Rewriting "the road to nowhere'' : place pedagogies in Western Sydney

Negative representations of parts of our cities are endemic in the Australian media, where certain suburbs function as motifs for failure"”past, present, and future. Indeed, as one journalist put it after invoking the "interchangeable" triumvirate of Sydney's Mount Druitt, Melbourne's West Heidelberg, and Brisbane's Inala, "geography is destiny" (Wynhausen, 2006). This article critiques the discourses at play in the media and explores the possibilities and limitations of a pilot project wherein an urban place-based pedagogy is taken up as a mode of critical response as high school students begin to document in text and images what they love about "Our place." Further possibilities for engaging critically with place are explored in the concluding section of the article.