ABSTRACT
Pedagogy, or the study of teaching and learning, both theoretically and practically, is all around us. Public forums of learning experiences—including journalism, art, museums, memorials, music, theater, film—come with the hopes of being accessible to all and engaging us in ways that educate in an informal fashion. These experiences, often referred to as public pedagogy, are a topic of research not only in education, but also political science, history, and geography. For geographers, one of the foremost ways by which we learn in a public forum is through the built public landscape. This essay takes existing literature on public pedagogy and underpins it with the idea of landscape. I then take a more specific approach and apply the idea of commemorative landscape to public pedagogy by comparing two examples of university campus memory work: the May 4, 1970, shootings at Kent State University, and Good Deeds Chairs Memorial at Syracuse University. I finish the essay by discussing my own attempts to bring a more pedagogical perspective to two local memorial sites. These perspectives culminate in emphasizing the critical role that architecture and design play in the pedagogical and affective potential of our memorial landscapes.
