Place-Based Education in the Global Age

Local Diversity

David A. Gruenewald, Gregory A. Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317670629
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

"Polished, clear, insightful, and meaningful.... This volume amounts to nothing less than a complete rethinking of what progressive education can be at its best and how education can be reconceptualized as one of the central practices of a genuinely democratic and sustainable society.... It is the kind of book that has the potential to be transformative."

Stephen Preskill, University of New Mexico

"The editors and contributors are pioneers in the field of educational theory, policy, and philosophy.... They are opening new areas of inquiry and educational reform in ways that promise to make this book in very short time into a classic.... The practical applications and experiments included reveal the richness of grassroots initiatives already underway to bring educational theory and policy down to earth. While spanning the richest and deepest intellectual ideas and concepts, the stories told are the types that practitioners and teachers will be able to relate to in their daily undertakings."

Madhu Suri Prakash, The Pennsylvania State University

This volume – a landmark contribution to the burgeoning theory and practice of place-based education – enriches the field in three ways: First, it frames place-based pedagogy not just as an alternative teaching methodology or novel approach to environmental education but as part of a broader social movement known as the "Anew localism", which aims toward reclaiming the significance of the local in the global age. Second, it links the development of ecological awareness and stewardship to concerns about equity and cultural diversity. Third, it presents examples of place-based education in action. The relationship between the new localism and place-based education is clarified and the process of making connections between learners and their wider communities is demonstrated. The book is organized around three themes:

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• Reclaiming Broader Meanings of Education;

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• Models for Place-Based Learning; and

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• Global Visions of the Local in Higher Education

This is a powerfully relevant volume for researchers, teacher educators, and students across the fields of curriculum theory, educational foundations, critical pedagogy, multicultural education, and environmental education.

I
Models for Place-Based Learning

Place-based education is both an old and a new phenomenon. All education prior to the invention of the common school was place-based. It is education as practiced in modern societies that has cut its ties to the local. Reformers such as John Dewey and William Heard Kilpatrick in the early 20th century spoke to the importance of incorporating students’ experience of particular communities and places into their formal education, but the tendency toward centralization and standardization in the broader society marginalized their perspective and the practices they advocated. Although the press toward standardization remains as strong or stronger than ever, educators in a variety of locales are developing approaches to teaching and learning that redirect students to the value of the local. In doing so, they have inspired a rebirth of interest in the potentialities of the unique knowledge and experience encountered in the multiplicity of cultures and subcultures that make up our increasingly global society. The chapters in this section describe possibilities that have emerged when people in schools link learning with phenomena immediately available to their senses and lives.

Clifford Knapp is one of the elders of the environmental education movement. His efforts, however, have never been focused entirely on natural phenomena. In Knapp’s chapter, he describes a range of different contemporary models of education that have sought to bridge the gap between students’ lives outside of school and what they encounter in classrooms. From the cultural journalism characteristic of the Foxfire program to real-world problem solving, these innovative approaches have offered practitioners a way to revitalize students’ interest in learning and not infrequently reenergized teachers themselves. Knapp provides a useful overview of possibilities that can arise as people in particular places direct their intelligence and imagination to what is close at hand.

This is exactly what art educator Mark Graham did with his students when he taught in a school located on Long Island, New York. Demonstrating the way that place-based education is as relevant to urban as well as rural students, Graham describes a course that introduced young people to place through art and art making. In an attempt to develop a way of looking at the world that was not dominated by the mass media, he encouraged students to examine and portray aspects of their own world left out of the images encountered on television and contemporary films. Drawing on history and art produced in earlier eras, the course sought to stimulate in students a way of seeing the world that focused less on the conquest and consumption of places than on the building of relationship and personal meaning. Graham’s work provides an example of the way teachers can help cultivate in their students the sense of connectedness that underlies the forms of caring and steward-ship essential to the maintenance of sustainable relationships between humans and the places where they live.

The next three chapters show how schools that attend to what is close at hand can lead to a transformation of communities and places. Educational leader and teacher Mark Sorensen describes the STAR School in northern Arizona and its work with students who are primarily of Navajo origin. Located just off the reservation, this small charter school aims to develop in its students a deep sense of kinship to other people and all things. The acronym that composes the school’s name, Service To All Relations, captures that purpose. Much of the school’s service to others can be seen in the way that students participate in activities that benefit their communities and the Earth. But another component can be seen in the way that the school itself seeks to model patterns of behavior aimed at showing local residents how they might shape new institutions, adopt innovative strategies for generating power or growing plants, or embrace less conflictual and more empowering patterns of communication and human interaction. At the intersection of many cultures, the STAR School seeks to affirm the local at the same time that it spurs its low-income and often disenfranchised supporters to imagine and make real more fulfilling lives for themselves and their children.

Julie Bartsch, a writer and activist employed by the Rural School and Community Trust, has been intimately involved with some of the educational and community development efforts described in Chapter 9 by Rachel Tompkins. Like the Navajo Reservation, rural communities in the Northeast corner of the United States are the victims of poverty and abandonment. Left on the margins of industrial society, small communities whose members once supported themselves by fishing and logging are faced with the out-migration of young people confounded by limited employment opportunities. The long-term health of these communities rests on their ability to revitalize their economies and cultures so that they can both support and attract the young. Place-based educational efforts, in part underwritten by the Rural Trust, exemplify what the convergence of schools and community development can accomplish.

Elaine Senechal recounts her experience as a science teacher in an inner-city Boston community that has been similarly abandoned by an economy and political trends that disregard the poor and people of color. As mentioned earlier, Senechal and her students at the Greater Egleston Community High School were faced with a rising incidence of asthma associated with traffic-caused air pollution. Basing their advocacy efforts on a state anti-idling law, students’ political efforts over a number of years led to a legal judgment against Boston’s transit authority that will result in the replacement of most its fleet of diesel busses with cleaner natural gas busses. As with the place-based educational efforts described in Sorensen’s and Bartsch’s chapters, a focus on local issues is linking students with their communities in ways that are improving the lives of their families and neighbors.

The final chapter in this section is written by Ray Barnhardt, a long-time advocate for Alaska Natives and other indigenous peoples. Barnhardt describes a statewide effort to integrate non-Western knowledge systems and cultural practices into Alaska’s public educational system. With sizeable grants from the National Science Foundation and the Annenberg Rural Challenge, the Alaska Native Knowledge Network (ANKN) started by Barnhardt and others has for over a decade been developing an approach to culturally responsive education that is now being adopted and modified by indigenous groups around the world. The ANKN demonstrates a systematic process for ensuring that local cultural knowledge systems are given a place in the education of children who are members of non-Western cultures. This approach validates cultural diversity by affirming not only the history and festivals of specific ethnic groups, but also the way in which these groups have constructed their understanding of the world and peoples’ relationship to it. These understandings are often disregarded or viewed as inferior to the Euro-American perspectives that dominate most school curricula. Barnhardt’s efforts demonstrate how parity between perspectives and practices can support the perpetuation of cultural traditions that have proven their appropriateness for the regions in which they have emerged. The Alaska Native Knowledge Network exemplifies a way to protect local cultures from the homogenizing effect of globalization, reminding us of the close link between diversity and locality.

By its very nature, place-based education is not something that can be packaged and then disseminated. It depends on the creative interaction between learners and the possibilities and requirements of specific places. What the models presented in this section provide is a sense of what can be accomplished when educators direct their attention to local phenomena. They should be seen, however, more as sources of inspiration than as recipes to be followed. Furthermore, these examples show that even within the context of highly bureaucratized and standardized educational systems, innovative teachers and activists are finding spaces within which to create learning opportunities that strengthen and extend students’ relationship to particular communities and places. In this process, many of these approaches to teaching and learning are contributing not only to the education of children but to the enhancement of the social and natural environments in which they live.

Chapter 1
Place-Based Curricular and Pedagogical Models

My Adventures in Teaching Through Community Contexts

Clifford E. Knapp

A place is a piece of the whole environment which has been claimed by feelings.

—Alan Gussow, Artist-in-Residence for Mother Nature (1974)

Introduction

I first started to think about the power of a place-based pedagogy in the early 1970s when I heard artist Alan Gussow speak about “a sense of place” at an outdoor education conference in New York. When he referred to “place” as a piece of the environment claimed by feelings, I understood why this idea captured my attention. Having grown up in a New Jersey suburb across the river from New York City in the 1940s and 1950s, I recalled the pleasant memories of exploring the vacant wood-lots and blackberry fields near home and fishing in the nearby waters (Knapp, 1999). A summer camp counselor job while in college was my introduction to teaching others about nature and human nature in places I then considered to be wilderness. I later pursued a career in outdoor and environmental education and taught at the elementary, junior and senior high, and university levels for over 40 years. My positive feelings about outdoor places were claimed early in life by my surroundings, including the people in them, and eventually I earned a living by “taking people for walks in the woods and fields.”

Today the field of place-based education has established a paper trail of thousands of pages in its young life as an educational movement. This doesn’t mean that place-based education has never before been tried in schools and other educational institutions. In fact the idea of learning from the local surroundings predates the formation of formal schooling; it was simply labeled differently or not labeled at all and implemented in a variety of ways. Several authors (Gruenewald, 2003; Powers, 2004; Smith, 2002; Sobel, 2004; Woodhouse & Knapp, 2000) acknowledge a variety of other descriptive names to indicate the linking of local places to the formal educational process. For example, the following terms have been used to describe forms of place-based education: community-based learning, service-learning, environment as an integrating concept, environment-based education, outdoor education, bioregional education, ecological education, sustainable-development education, cultural journalism, nature studies, real-world problem solving, and many others. A few researchers (e.g., Hug, 1998), believe that place-based education is a unique descriptor emerging as a result of an evolution of historical terminology and practice. From the late 1800s to the present time, several movements in schools have promoted the educational use of local areas as integral parts of the curriculum: nature study, conservation education, outdoor education, environmental education, and more recently, place-based education. Both viewpoints about terminology illustrate how educational movements take on various labels depending on who conceives of and writes about them.

An article by Newmann and Oliver appearing in the Harvard Educational Review in 1967 describes their idea of place-based education as “a proposal for education in community” (pp. 95–101). They recommended that learning should be pursued in three different contexts: the school, the laboratory-studio-work, and the community seminar. In the school context, they recognize the need for systematic, preplanned, and formalized instruction in basic literacy skills, health and hygiene, and the like. In this context the teacher has clear objectives with terminal student behaviors in mind. They recommend that school learning should be problem-centered and exciting and should constantly consider reorganizing basic content leading to insights and understandings. They see this kind of learning as only one of three types that should occur during the educational process. In the second context, labeled “laboratory-studio-work,” the completion of tasks is the major objective. Laboratories could be factories, art studios, hospitals, libraries, or political headquarters. Student activity would be governed by the developing nature of the selected problem or task. In these types of laboratories, learning should occur as a by-product of genuine participation in the activities. In the third context, community seminar, the purpose would be to reflectively explore community issues and meanings. Leaders of these seminars could be teachers hired by the school or any other qualified community expert. The major purpose of the seminars would be reflection and deliberation on the actions stimulated by the laboratory context. Again, learning in the seminars should not be preplanned, nor would there be specific tasks or problems to solve. Newman and Oliver thoroughly outlined an educational plan that linked formal schooling with the community context without inventing a specific label for it.

For purposes of this chapter, Sobel’s (2004, p. 7) broad definition of place-based education was chosen:

The process of using the local community and environment as a starting point to teach concepts in language arts, mathematics, social studies, science, and other subjects across the curriculum. Emphasizing hands-on, real-world learning experiences, this approach to education increases academic achievement, helps students develop stronger ties to their community, enhances students’ appreciation for the natural world, and creates a heightened commitment to serving as active, contributing citizens. Community vitality and environmental quality are improved through the active engagement of local citizens, community organizations, and environmental resources in the life of the school.

For those seeking other definitions of the term, the references at the end of the chapter provide other variations on this major theme. Kehrberg (n.d., pp. 1–2) at the University of Montana, writes: “Place-based education is a broad term that not only refers to a method of teaching, but a growing movement to redefine schooling, and a theory about how we should ultimately view education. Therefore, developing one simple definition for this term proves difficult.”

This chapter deals mainly with what I learned from teaching 12 semesters of a graduate course in place-based education at Northern Illinois University. It describes the curricular and pedagogical models I used in designing this course titled, “Integrating Community Resources Into Curriculum and Instruction.” I taught the first of these 12 courses in 1991 and the last in 2004. In 1992 I published an article (Knapp) describing my responses to teaching the course for the first time. Then I had many more questions than answers about how this learner-centered style of teaching was supposed to work. Obviously I had enough confidence in the approach and in myself to continue teaching in that way for another 11 courses. The more I taught the course, the more I was convinced that I was doing something important and that my students were learning about place-based education and other needed skills and concepts. This chapter also provides an outline of my educational philosophy and how it was applied to the implementation of the course.

Sharing Excerpts from My Educational Philosophy

I believe firmly in sharing my educational philosophy with my students during the first few meetings of the class. This is important because everything that we will do together is derived directly from this world-view of teaching and learning. Each time I redesigned and taught the course, I attempted to make my course syllabus align more consistently with my developing educational philosophy. Just as the design of the course changed slightly each time after teaching it, my educational philosophy also changed in some ways.

The acts of teaching and learning have dominated my adult life. I learned so that I could teach and I taught so that I could learn. Teaching and learning are inextricably connected and both have been important to me. Now, I don’t do one without being aware of the other.

Teaching is a process of creating climates and conditions that engage students in learning with others. My primary role as designated leader is to structure course experiences rich in poten...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Preface
• Contributor List
• Introduction: Making Room for the Local
• I MODELS FOR PLACE-BASED LEARNING
• II RECLAIMING BROADER MEANINGS OF EDUCATION
• III GLOBAL VISIONS OF THE LOCAL IN HIGHER EDUCATION
• AFTERWORD Creating a Movement to Ground Learning in Place
• Author Index
• Index