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Place-Based Education: Learning to Be Where We are

One of the primary strengths of place-based education is that it can adapt to the unique characteristics of particular places, and in this way it can help overcome the disjuncture between school and children's lives that is found in too many classrooms, Mr. Smith points out. LAST SUMMER I spent a morning with eight or nine high school students who were members of an Upward Bound program based at Clatsop Community College in Astoria, Oregon. The students were working in the Neawanna Estuary in Seaside, about 22 miles to the south. The efforts of students before them had contributed much of the data used in a successfully funded urban renewal grant proposal aimed at transforming a set of abandoned mill ponds into a park and nature center. The job of the Upward Bound students for the preceding few weeks had been to tag and then locate with global positioning technology woody debris that makes good salmon habitat. Students from Seaside schools were mapping habitat for birds and other wildlife in a similar fashion. All this information would be channeled to the groups responsible for determining how this land could best be developed to support its wildlife populations and to provide local residents and tourists with a deeper understanding of what it takes to preserve and restore healthy ecosystems. The morning was overcast and cool enough to warrant care as we clambered into and out of the canoes to do our work. Wet clothes would not dry quickly under this cloud cover. Another challenge was not losing our knee-length rubber Wellingtons to the deep mud along the river's banks. The debris was everywhere, and the three-person teams in each canoe divided up different stretches of the river to map. Pulling up next to a log that stretched down into the water, one person would nail into the wood a bar code affixed to a plastic rectangle cut from a food container. A second person would determine our precise coordinates. The third -- with dry hands -- would record bar code, coordinates, and a brief description of the debris on a data sheet. Then we would paddle on to the next log or collection of branches. The work was not glamorous, and all of us were mud-speckled by the time we broke for lunch. Still, the students agreed that it beat sitting in a classroom listening to a lecture. They enjoyed being outdoors and working with teachers who acted more like partners than supervisors. They liked the fun of negotiating riffles and being on the water together. It pleased them to be doing something that was clearly useful, and seeing their data transformed into maps was impressive. One young woman observed that she had recently watched a TV show about Japanese education and learned that students there were much more skilled in mathematics because they are given so many opportunities to apply their school learning to real-life situations. She believed that her work in the Neawanna was similar to this and that there was no reason these experiences could not be made available to more students. My morning with these young people provides an example of an educational approach that is being encountered in a growing number of American schools. Called place-based education, its aim is to ground learning in local phenomena and students' lived experience. Although most human learning once occurred within the context of specific locales, the invention and proliferation of schools changed this. In schools, especially after the early elementary grades, teachers direct children's attention away from their own circumstances and ways of knowing and toward knowledge from other places that has been developed by strangers they most likely will never meet. Learning becomes something gained through reading texts, listening to lectures, or viewing videos rather than through experiencing full-bodied encounters with the world. Although educators are often quick to say that schools are as much the "real world" as any place else, there is truth to the judgment that what happens in classrooms is qualitatively different from what happens elsewhere. …