“In These Shoes Is the Silent Call of the Earth”

Curriculum integration poses hard questions to those involved in the educational endeavour. Understood conceptually and in general, "shoes" bear no history, no memory, no continuity, no dependencies, no place, and no communities of relations. They are not someone's in this place, and, in this sense, they are simply an idea of shoes, not fleshy and warm and curved just so. What emerges from taking the particular shoes seriously in their wholeness is a sense that things have integral places. Things themselves, in their very particularity, issue a sense of belonging somehow, in intractable relations of materiality, obligation, community, history, memory, and so on. The integration or wholeness that ensues, therefore, is not just about these particular shoes. Rather, the phenomenon of integration or wholeness itself, as involving an attention to place and memory and relations and community, starts to come forward.