The Worlds Educators Create: The Role of Education in the Creation of Place: by Matthew Clay

As a teacher practitioner, I often find myself immersed in educational literature either lacking spirit through cold quantification of the human experience or innately deficient in sound intellectual capacity. For me, Matthew Clay’s (2023)The Worlds Educators Create: The Role of Education in the Creation of Place is like finally breathing untainted air. Clay’s contribution might be thought of as a scholarly gem in the sense that it seamlessly weaves heart and research, soul and mind. Further, Indigenous scholar Sandy Grande has relayed the significance of “praying with your feet” (2020, 15:01). This description means unrelenting hope, an informed and determined faith that lives as feet-on-the-ground action. This orientation toward action is perhaps what I appreciate most about Clay’s well-rounded literary culmination. He invites and initiates critical praxis. Clay (2023) states, “Although rarely explicitly stated, the ultimate outcome of teaching about and for place is action, not necessarily knowledge alone” (p. 12). Freire (2000) reminds educators that we are not “built in silence”; rather, from word, work, and “action-reflection” (p. 88). Clay cultivates a compassionate and inclusive dialogue that, as Freire (2000) insists, “cannot exist” provided the “absence of a profound love for the world and for people” (p. 89). As such, Clay deeply reveres the interstice linking people and place, the “gestalt,” if you will, per Clay’s reference to Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess; this positionality, in turn, manifests via an artful synthesis of interconnectedness, practicality, and, dare I say, love.