The poetry of place, the place of poetry

This chapter examines the role of place-based learning in the Singapore Literature curriculum in the form of Learning Journeys conducted for preservice teachers at the National Institute of Education. In contrast to dominant global, skills-based, anxiety-driven instruction and assessment focussed on short-term outcomes, place-based learning re-centres the local as significant for student learning. While place-based literature education has the potential to encourage understanding both of place and poetry through the connection to the affective and the mediation of text and place, one peril is the tendency to romanticize the local and ignore the global. As such, a global literary curriculum must aim towards a critical place-based curriculum that complicates the local and brings the global in its discussions of poetry and place.