Learning with place as a catalyst for action (original) (raw)

Place-based education: a transformative activist stance

Cultural Studies of Science Education, 2010

The ethnography presented by van Eijck and Roth focuses on the activities of people involved in a government funded internship program in conservation and restoration, which was offered by a 'multidisciplinary research center' through a local First Nation adult education center. The internship was designed, in partnership with a local non-profit conservation society (OceanHealth), to appeal to First Nation men and women considering career change, returning to school, or re-entering the work place. The primary aim of the internship was to 'provide authentic science for diverse student populations (and their teachers), with particular attention to the needs of students from First Nations, to become scientifically literate to the extent that it prepares them for participating in public debates, community decision-making, and personal living consistent with long-term environmentally sustainable forms of life'. The authors report that at least one of the two interns was not interested in science and a WSÁ NEC elder expressed dissatisfaction with the efforts to establish the nature park and its current approved uses. Van Eijck and Roth argue that the divergence between the project aims and the goals of the participants are a result of how 'place' is viewed in place-based education and that disagreements like these can be resolved if place is theorized as chronotope. There are many interesting ideas raised and directions taken in the article by van Eijck and Roth. After several discussions during the review process, we decided to focus our forum response on the meaning of 'place' in place-based education, the utility of theorizing place as a chronotope, the implications for teaching-learning ('education'), and musings on what remains unclear.

Going back and beyond: children’s learning through places

Environmental Education Research, 2017

In 1919, the Canadian province of British Columbia (BC) established the Elementary Correspondence (EC) School to provide formal education for children living in rural areas with difficult access to a school. Through children's letters, this paper interrogates the concept of place, a key one for placed-based approaches to environmental education. Place-based education has focused on natural and rural environments to engage students in environmental learning, sometimes presenting the desirability of connectedness to nature and the local community with nostalgia and romanticism. Children's letters suggest that their learning has long been shaped by their places, material and imaginary, and that the EC school was a place as important as nature in children's learning and schooling. Children's letters contribute a rich historical perspective that helps to rethink the rural/ urban divide into a relationship of mutual constitution of childhood and nature across time and space. This excerpt, from a letter written in 1935 by 14-year-old Amy Pelly gives us some insights into children's learning experiences through their rural places in the Canadian province of BC, earlier in the century. This letter belongs to the BCA, containing hundreds of letters written by parents and children to their EC school teachers in Victoria, BC, in the 1920s to the 1950s. 2 In this paper, I address the urban/ child/nature intersection by bringing to the present the experiences of children that lived in the past of the Canadian province of BC in a time and in a place where children struggled to get an education. While children learned through their intimate contact with nature, as Amy Pelly's letter suggests, they also learned from those places beyond their localities, like the EC School located in the city of Victoria. Although many children did not have any contact with other places than theirs own, they recreated the urban worlds in their imaginations, as lively expressed in their letters, through their teachers' letters, the books they read, or somebody else's stories. Children's imagination helped them to interpret their lives and themselves as students vis à vis to their images about the city. Place-based approaches to environmental education focus on place to teach students to be sensitive to the needs of the environment, to understand environmental problems, and promote sustainable solutions to prevent environmental damage (

Place, matters of concern, and pedagogy: Making impactful connections with our planet

Journal of Early Childhood Teacher Education, 2017

Neoliberalism, capitalist ideas, and the disastrous human-induced state of the environment are evidence of the lack of connection between humans and the earth, calling for a rethinking of the relationships between humans and the planet. As early childhood educators, we wonder about our role in rethinking these relationships and in particular, the relationship between children and planet. In this article, we articulate the actions and positioning of teachers in three different research studies and various contexts (Victoria, AUS; Oregon, USA; California, USA) utilizing Latour's (2004) 'matters of concern' as a framework to rethink engagement and relationality. Each project considers how place can be a provocation that makes visible the entanglement of children, families, teachers, and the more-than-human as a way to rethink pedagogy. The limitations, tensions, and possibilities that occur within and across these entanglements are explored, highlighting how the enacted practices could disrupt dominant early childhood discourses and practices.

The Primacy of Place in Education in Outdoor Settings

In this chapter, we explore and support the call for greater attention to be paid to place in outdoor education. We consider this call to have particular relevance since education in the outdoors can work as an antidote to what some have described as a sense of de-placement (Orr 1994) as inhabitants of local places that are globally connected. Casey, analyst and interpreter of the deep history of philosophical perspectives on place, provides a starting point for our understanding of how, as educators, we might usefully take more account of place as an event that is always 'newly emergent' and radically heterogeneous (Casey, 1998). Our main argument is that place has begun to, and needs to further '(re-)appear' as a primary eventful feature of our understanding of our life in the world but that we need to push further to theorise and understand how in education in outdoor settings. We seek to theorise and suggest ways for how we might more sensitively plan and enact place-responsive outdoor education. We hope our contributions will have relevance for the fields of outdoor education (in formal or non-formal curricula) in outdoor experiential learning, adventure education, fieldwork, and other forms of provision in education settings (such as outdoor play in early years) or in local areas (for example in forest, beach, or urban settings).

The Terrain of Place-Based Education: A Primer for Teacher Education in Canada

Brock Education Journal, 2021

The trajectory of place-based education (PBE) is laid out by drawing on literature from outdoor, experiential, environmental, critical, and land-based education to map key intersections and influences. Directions for PBE with respect to decolonization and reinhabitation-and the meaningful acknowledgement of Indigenous knowledge systems-are explored. Implications for teacher education are addressed.

Face-to-Face with Place: Place-Based Education in the Fraser Canyon

2021

organized a three-day field experience with 35 pre-service teachers along the Fraser Canyon corridor, home of the Nlaka'pamux and Stó:lō Nations. We asked: How will an educational field experience in this place impact and inform pre-service teachers and researchers' understanding of placebased education (PBE) in their practice? We explore the shift towards Indigenous perspectives that subtly wove its way through the work and how it framed new ways of thinking about place for our participants and new ways of considering decolonizing education for the instructor researchers. We conclude by arguing that PBE is necessitated by active, living relationship in place and provides opportunities for critical pedagogy grounded in Indigeneity. We also suggest that both Indigenous and non-Indigenous educators have a role to play in this work. "Is it not time to face place-to confront it, take off its veil and see its full face." (Johnson and Murton, 2007, p. 127). On September 12, 2019, two instructor researchers traveled with 35 pre-service teachers to a place that lived in our minds and hearts: the Fraser Canyon corridor 1 , in what is now British Columbia, Canada. We were seeking to better understand place-based education (PBE), an approach to learning that has gained prominence in the last decade (Lowenstein et al.