I am most drawn to third section in The Changing Social Spaces of Learning by Leander, Phillips, and Taylor. The connection between human and critical geography in better understanding how young people experience and move between space has been of interest to me. I am in the process of conducting some critical participatory action research with my students (see my stakeholders forum) with a focus on how my students experience their communities, specifically how they see the strengths and areas for improvement in their communities. This work started off asking students to describe outdoor spaces that they spend time in and how they see that environment and the behaviors that people engage in. While reading this piece, many ideas and questions resonated for me so I will include some here to help me document my thinking:

• As adults, we/I make a lot of assumptions about what my students will find interesting and connect with…as much as I try to make the research participatory, I find that my own motives and ways of thinking gently nudge the direction of research…can we ever be truly open to all voices? 
• What are my students understanding of community, neighborhood, identity, and social life? How do they define/identify  their community and how do they experience community in the neighborhoods where they live and the spaces they move between? How is their identity tied/not tied to their neighborhoods?
• How do young people feel they are perceived in the different spaces they move from, through, to? How are these spaces gendered, classed, raced and do they experience that and in what ways? On what level are they aware of this?
• How much autonomy do young people experience and what influences this? I wonder a lot about my students who travel to my school in Manhattan from all 5 boroughs…do they have different levels of autonomy and how do they leverage this? How does autonomy and mobility compare to young people that attend more neighborhood high schools?
• How much agency do young people have in urban environments to make decisions about how they use spaces?
• How can I use more mapping/memory maps to better learn about the places my students value and why these places have value?
• How are students living in different parts of the city experiencing different levels of opportunity/privilege and a sense of value?…I love this Breitbart (1998) point…                  “Young people who live in declining parts of the city are profoundly aware of the influence that their local environments exert. They can literally see and feel the contraints that dangerous and/or inadequately provisioned neighborhoods place upon them, and they can appreciate the opportunities that safe places, with ample resource provide…These spaces send messages to young people about how an external world values or fails to value the quality of their lives (p. 308)

All of these ideas and questions are significant to me as a lot of my work attempts to connect students to their local environments and engage them in some sort of action research around a topic that is important to them. We obviously talk a lot in education about connecting students to the local and meaningful and it is through this connection that we build more critical and engaged learners and citizens.