‘Tongues in trees’: Reimagining the regions through pastoral place-based pedagogy

This essay uses the pastoral conjured in William Shakespeare’s As You Like It to reflect on the experience of teaching Shakespeare in regional far north Queensland. By aligning the pastoral with the concept of the ‘region’, the essay negotiates the complex relationship between a sense of lived place and the literary places imagined and constructed in the texts we encounter in our teaching, writing, and research. The explicit connection of these two places – regional and pastoral – will prove mutually enlightening as the discussion works towards a framework for enabling students to incorporate a sense of place in literary studies through the concept of ardenspace. This discussion will draw on place-based learning in order to examine the way our senses of literary and regional place are imaginatively constructed and how this affects – and can be utilised in – research, writing, and teaching.