SOM07563 Space and place in education: (still) speaking from the margins Margaret Somerville, Monash University Abstract The questions of climate change, drought and eco-social sustainability have emerged recently as the big questions facing global populations today. These are issues of space and place. The response to these problems has largely been framed in terms of the techno-scientific solutions of modernity – moving water, building more dams, de- salination plants - combined with a neoliberal economic approach - water trading, carbon trading, economic sanctions. But what might be an adequate educational response? How might we educate a generation of children and adults who inhabit a global cyber world to be attached to their local places, to inhabit, and to know place differently? Introduction This is an introductory paper for a symposium on space and place in education. The purpose is to begin to develop a broad conceptual framework for thinking about space and place in education which will be applied more specifically in other papers presented as part of this symposium. Several of these papers are part of a research project about place pedagogies 1 so in this paper I link the broad theoretical frameworks of space and place to education through the idea of place pedagogies. The paper is futuristic and exploratory, intending to open up discussion, rather than to provide answers. I use a mixture of personal journal writing to locate my self in the place of this thinking and a very brief overview of some key ideas that have emerged in my reading. I frame the paper within the imperative for educational research to engage with the phenomenon of climate change. The local/global phenomena of climate change, drought, and extremes of weather have become an important focal point for my thinking about space and place in education since I moved to Latrobe Valley in mid 2006. It seems to be inevitable. Over the twelve months since I have been located there, the drought that has ravaged the Murray-Darling basin has worsened, the sense that climate change is at least partly responsible for the drought in Australia has been confirmed, and global concerns about climate change have reached crisis point, culminating in the publication of the Stern report in May, 2007. The Stern report, representing the work of 700 scientists, confirms that the global warming resulting from the greenhouse effect is the result of human intervention, largely caused by burning fossil fuels to produce energy 2 . 1 I acknowledge the Australian Research Council for their support for Enabling place pedagogies in rural and urban Australia, Somerville, Davies, Power and Gannon. 2 It is not my intention here to elaborate on the science of climate change but to draw attention to climate change as a complex phenomenon that links the ecological and the social and presents us with an educational imperative.