Placed Based Education : Some Snippets

Some snippets from an interesting paper (While the entire paper is interesting I found this portion to be all the more pertinent and have taken the liberty to remove the references and cull 600 odd words from a 21 page paper)

Place-Based education at Island Community School

Aimee Howley, Marged Howley, Christi Camper and Heike Perko

The Journal of Environment Education 42 (4), 216 – 236, 2011

Placed-Based Education (PBE) and Environmental Education (EE): Definitions and Comparisons

PBE is a progressive form of education in which students use their own communities as the source of issues to investigate the location for learning, and, indeed, as an important motivation for learning. Its aim, according to some scholars, is to promote students’ understanding of the interdependence of their lives with those of others in their communities. To strengthen student-community connections, PBE offers opportunities for students to explore the geography, ecology, sociology, and politics of their communities as well as to draw on their communities’ multigenerational and multicultural resources.

Educators and theorists who write about PBE also typically claim that it requires students to become involved in “active” or “experiential learning”. Recognizing that different locales provide different opportunities for actively engaging students, however, these writers talk about how schools, students, teachers, and community members all collaborate to design distinctive curricula that draw on local resources. According to some authors, this collaborative approach provides a wide range of experiences, facilitates multiple connections, and situates learning within the wider domain of community-based problem solving. As a result of these features, PBE is, by nature, interdisciplinary.

(Some) believe that, by attuning students to their local culture, heritage, and geography, PBE effectively teaches skills in inquiry, values clarification, and problem solving. These learning experiences enable students to recognize the impact of their local environment on global sustainability. PBE not only prepares students to become informed citizens, it simultaneously teaches them to make wise choices that have broader environmental implications.

One commonly held view is that the goal of EE is to equip students with the decision-making skills and values enabling them to make environmentally conscious choices. As several authors explain, EE instills a sense of personal responsibility and empathy in students, thereby encouraging them to seek and enact innovative solutions to environmental problems and to work toward environmental sustainability.

Another shared premise is that EE should prepare students to investigate specific environmental issues. This aim sometimes is equated with “environmental literacy,” and sometimes it is also linked to critical thinking, as illustrated in the following definition. [Environmental Education] means educating “for” the environment—with strategies that promote critical thinking over knowledge transmission, investigation over indoctrination, and collaborative, local, science-based solutions over advocacy-driven measures.  Many writers in the field of EE also see this curricular focus as necessarily involving an interdisciplinary framework that gives students on-going opportunities to interact with nature.

According to some of these authors, interaction with nature should begin in early childhood and continue throughout the school. They also maintain that authentic interactions with the environment should be organized deliberately in an effort to cultivate environmentally responsible behavior.

In general, both PBE and EE support inquiry as a mode of authentic learning that is active and experiential. Emphasis on learning by doing and learning through service-oriented projects aims to promote investigation of relevant issues and application of problem-solving strategies. Both approaches also see value in interdisciplinary instruction in field sites as an important way to help students apply knowledge meaningfully. In addition, engagement with community is an important concern of both place-based and environmental educators. Both approaches seek to equip students with transferable knowledge and skills that will enable them to make contributions to and assume responsibility for the health of their communities.

Although the overlap between PBE and EE is substantial, there are also some differences. For example, for some environmental educators, the natural world is “the environment,” and social and cultural conditions represent influences on the environment (for good or ill). But for others, the interaction between the natural world and the social and cultural forces that influence the natural world represent the environment.