The Benefits of Place-based Education

(Adapted from briefing materials for “All of a Place: A Funders’ Institute on Connecting Schools, Youth and Community” prepared by Jack Chin, Funders’ Forum on Environment and Education, and Lucy Bernholz, Blueprint Research and Design)

“Whatever landscape a child is exposed to early on, that will be the sort of gauze through which he or she will see all the world afterwards.”

- Wallace Stegner

Recent years have seen countless technological and economic changes that enable increased mobility, globalized economies, and instant communications - benefiting those who have access to them and leaving behind those who do not. So rapid have been the changes that an understanding of their implications for local communities is only starting to surface. A December 15, 1999 New York Times editorial posits that this global reach and phenomenal speed will lead to a diminishing “influence of the local” as “the places we inhabit anchor us less and less.”  

This loss of connectedness to place is particularly acute in poor communities. UNESCO’s Growing up in Cities program found children in the San Antonio district of Oakland had a limited view of their local place. Twenty-eight Cambodian and Mexican children in the Oak Park apartment complex were asked to draw their neighborhood. Almost all of the participants in the study (ages 10 to 14) “drew the apartment complex alone. Few could identify city landmarks even within a one-mile radius of their home. When they were asked about the farthest place that they had been in Oakland, most of the children said that they didn’t know, or named places such as Lake Tahoe, Reno, Boston and Canada, suggesting that they failed to understand the city’s boundaries or identity.”[1]

What are the implications of this growing disconnection for schools, youth and community? Gregory A. Smith, a professor of education at Lewis and Clark College, defines a role for education in response to these circumstances: “Restless, always on the move, few Americans, rural or urban, have developed the sense of connection to the land or their communities upon which an ethic of care and responsibility can develop.  Place-based or rooted education offers a means for changing this. Over the past decade, educators from New England to Alaska have been relocating the curriculum away from generic texts to the particularities of their own communities and regions. This process has been accompanied by the adoption of instructional practices that draw heavily on student initiative and responsibility as well as the talent and expertise of adults outside the school. The results have included higher levels of student engagement, more commitment to public education, energized and excited teachers and principals and a renewed sense of what there is to value in the local.”[2]

Restless, always on the move, few Americans, rural or urban, have developed the sense of connection to the land or their communities upon which an ethic of care and responsibility can develop.  Place-based or rooted education offers a means for changing this.

 

Harvard School of Education researcher Carla Littrell Fontaine describes the need for place-based education in this way: “As we consider the kind of education that will meet the challenges of the decades ahead, we speculate as to what will best serve our young people and the place they call home. Many emphasize a desire for young people to feel connected – connected to people of different ages and backgrounds, connected to the history of their families, communities and environment, connected to the institutions that enrich their lives and livelihoods, connected to ideals that encourage them to take responsibility for the place in which they live.”[3]

Place-based education has many forms. The most critical characteristic is the use of the local environment, on and/or near the school site, “as a comprehensive framework for learning in all areas: general and disciplinary knowledge; thinking and problem solving; basic life skills and interpersonal communication; as well as developing an appreciation and understanding of natural and social systems.”[4] Curriculum that uses the local environment as an integrating context for learning encompasses several proven educational practices, including:

Interdisciplinary integration of subject matter

Collaborative instruction

Emphasis on real-world, problem-based learning

Learner-centered, constructivist methods

Combinations of independent and cooperative learning

Former elementary school principal Sandy Neumann describes how place-based learning occurred at her site: “Rather than add more layers of curriculum to study place, we incorporated a sense of place into the work we were doing. Through environmental project-based learning, we were able to combine intellectual growth with real-life experience. Learning took place both inside and outside the school. Students learned from the creek that flows through the school campus and the gardens on the school grounds…We invited members of the local community to share their knowledge and history of our place. They grew to understand the place where they lived.”[5]

Place is nebulous to educators because to a great extent we are a displaced people for whom our immediate places are no longer sources of food, water, livelihood, energy, materials, friends, recreation or sacred inspiration.

Using communities as a context for learning is starting to be recognized as a core curricular frame. In several innovative efforts around the country, the local environment, both natural and social, is being used (with real academic outcomes) as an integrating frame for the school curriculum. This movement is newly emerging and has many hurdles to overcome. As Oberlin College professor David Orr points out, “…place has no particular standing in contemporary education… Place is nebulous to educators because to a great extent we are a displaced people for whom our immediate places are no longer sources of food, water, livelihood, energy, materials, friends, recreation or sacred inspiration.”[6]

 Fortunately, there are several exemplary place-based education programs around the country, based in different institutions and serving a range of ages. Brief introductions to a few of these programs follow.

Tule Elk Park (San Francisco)[7]

This outdoor learning environment grew out of the transformation of a San Francisco Unified School District children center’s asphalt playground into a park. Parents, educators, community leaders, staff, philanthropists and others involved in the project sought to provide urban children with greater access to the outdoors and to connect the school with the community. In doing so, the Center now demonstrates that recreating and sustaining the schoolyard as an outdoor learning environment challenges the children to develop literacy and numeracy skills, and brings out their innate connection to the natural world, to place, to each other, and to the community at large.

Specific benefits identified by the project include:

For learning-

Exposes children to the natural world on a daily basis

Provides a safe and accessible area for experiential, in-depth learning

Offers unlimited opportunities for child-initiated projects and curriculum

For the environment-

Emphasizes our dependence on a healthy natural world

Improves air and watershed quality

Provides animals and insect habitat in urban areas

Sensitizes our children to the natural world

For community development-

Provides recreation and green space in the urban center

Creates a sense of neighborhood ownership of the school and yard

Places children’s educational and play spaces at the center of renewed urban communities

The Center serves over 230 pre-school and K-3 school age children who come from low-income families all over San Francisco for childcare and afterschool programs. Tule Elk Park is also open to the community on Saturdays.

West Philadelphia Improvement Corps (WEPIC)[8]

Thirteen West Philadelphia schools are drawing on the resources of universities and surrounding communities to develop deep, rich and thematically related learning experiences that connect academic exploration, community service and community revitalization (www.upenn.edu/ccp). In one joint learning experience, University of Pennsylvania and University City High School students teamed up with former residents of a neighborhood displaced by urban renewal in the 1950s and 1960s known as Black Bottom. Working together, participants explored interviewing techniques, personal recollections, and the performing arts as a means to study history. The project culminated in a series of “Black Bottom Sketches,” written and performed by students and community members.

Themes based on environmental planning, health and nutrition, and literacy developed at several elementary and middle school feeder schools also have been extended and adapted at the high school level. For example, a university nutrition class studying food supply, control and usage helped younger students learn about nutrition, analyze their own eating patterns and create a student-run fruit bar. At the high school level, the focus shifted from studying consumption to learning about alternative production techniques and managing a business.

WEPIC at University City High School is focused particularly on strengthening students’ school-to-work opportunities. WEPIC, the University of Pennsylvania and other community partners have developed a wide variety of paid internships and work experiences.

Community-based School Environmental Education/CO-SEED (New England)

Eleven communities in northern New England are currently engaged in an innovative effort to “reach deep into the local communit[ies] in order to generate a rich academic program that joins local resources, issues and wisdom with the public school culture.”

Antioch New England Institute’s Community-based School Environmental Education project (CO-SEED) (http://www.cee-ane.org/elp/coseed.html) helps parents, community leaders, teachers and students identify local interests, needs and problems that become the themes of school and community-based curriculum. This project uses the community as a learning laboratory to improve students’ educational experiences in ways that align with New Hampshire Curriculum Frameworks, particularly in science.

Steering committees at each of the sites organize “Community Profiles” through which a broad range of community members assess their community’s own strengths and weaknesses and develop a vision for the future. Projects are chosen that emerge directly from community needs. These projects translate into curricula that offer opportunities for students to participate directly in the civic life of their communities.

At one site, Great Brook Middle School in Antrim, New Hampshire, students planned and implemented a cleanup and planting project when residents identified a downtown park in need of fixing up. The students use the schoolyard and surrounding wetland as a learning laboratory for interdisciplinary study, and a new unit on geology makes use of local field trips to earth-materials businesses. Local issues, standards-based instruction and hands-on service learning are all part of the new instruction.  The new approach is working so well that in 1998-1999, the school was named the state’s Middle School of the Year.

What does the research indicate?

 

Place-based education programs have shown positive influence on academic and social outcomes. A State Education and Environment Roundtable study[9] of 40 programs in 13 states found “improved performance on standardized measures of reading, writing, math, science, and social studies; development of higher-level, critical thinking skills; reduced problems with discipline and classroom management; and increased engagement in learning.” The study also found that teachers were “more enthusiastic about teaching and students learn more effectively within an environment-based context than within a traditional educational framework.” A subsequent study in California found that schools using the environment as an integrating context for learning (EIC) compared favorably with control schools

Teachers were more enthusiastic about teaching and students learn more effectively within an environment-based context than within a traditional educational framework.

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in seven of eight paired sets.[10]  The evidence is preliminary, but strong enough that the Education Commission of the States recognizes EIC as a “promising practice that show[s] evidence of success in improving student achievement.” The Commission identifies EIC as a valuable approach for achieving comprehensive school reform and improving learning for at-risk students.[11]

Similarly, a new report from the National Environmental Education and Training Foundation[12] presents case studies of schools and programs that have used environment-based education to improve the quality of education in the following ways:

Reading scores improve, sometimes spectacularly;

Math scores also improve;

Students perform better in science and social studies;

Students develop the ability to make connections and transfer their knowledge from familiar to unfamiliar contexts;

Students learn to “do science” rather than just “learn about science”;

Classroom discipline problems decline; and

Every child has the opportunity to learn at a high level.

A qualitative evaluation of the CO-SEED program,[13] conducted by Harvard researcher Fontaine, corroborates the findings of these broader studies. In documenting and evaluating the successes and challenges in implementation of the first phase of CO-SEED, Fontaine observes, “CO-SEED has made inroads in helping educators and community members think about their local resources as educational, helping dispel the common perception of small towns and communities as deficient and helping to instill, instead, an appreciation for a newly found stewardship of the land. This appreciation opens up possibilities for learning that goes beyond the walls of the classroom and inspires a more open-ended inquiry-driven, community-based curriculum.” A sixth grader who is involved in the Antrim Center project, where students are creating a proposal for developing a 16-acre site as a nature center and recreation site, captures the essence of the program:

I know from my other school that just because a project is in a classroom, sitting at desks, does not mean that it is more real than a project outside. In fact, I feel that Antrim Center is even more ‘real’ than just being in a classroom talking about trees and stonewalls. The reason for this is because we are actually outside walking those stonewalls and measuring those trees. Being a part of Antrim Center has made me more curious about the land around me. By that I mean instead of just looking at a piece of land and saying, ‘Oh, it’s some woods,’ I think about what could be living in those woods. I didn’t know working on a piece of land could be so interesting. Antrim Center has gotten me interested in things like animal tracks and plant identification.

A recent evaluation[14] of Yosemite National Institute’s hands-on, experiential learning programs also provides evidence of beneficial outcomes. The Institute’s field-based, science education programs focus on three themes: Developing a Sense of Place, Understanding Interconnections, and Fostering Stewardship. The study finds that virtually all of the students were active and engaged in the learning process. Over 93% of all students actively communicated during activities. The number of times girls spoke during programming was virtually equal to the frequency that boys spoke. This is a marked contrast from traditional classroom settings.

The benefits of service learning, which is often a hallmark of place-based learning projects such as WEPIC and CO-SEED, are well documented.  Profiles of Success: Engaging Young People’s Hearts and Minds Through Service Learning[15] compiles evidence of the impact of service-learning on students’ personal and social development, academic learning and career aspirations, and civic responsibility, as well as impacts on schools and communities.

A literature review[16] on schoolyard learning conducted by the Education Development Center finds research that substantiates the effects of schoolyard programs, such as Tule Elk Park, on academic learning and child development. A 1998 University of Michigan study revealed that “many educators perceive a host of positive benefits stemming from the integration of the schoolyard into the students’ learning experience… Teachers attribute schoolyard success to: the value of hands-on experience; the pride and sense of ownership in projects; the opportunity to learn using more of the senses; and the range of subjects that can be addressed by outside activities. A study conducted in the UK finds “a positive relationship between the design of the school grounds and the way they are managed, and children’s attitudes and behavior.” Research by Sonja Skelly and Jayne Zajicek on the effects of elementary school gardening programs in Texas finds that children who participated showed more positive environmental attitudes than those who did not.

 

Children are losing their traditional play environment, which has traditionally been outdoors and in nature.  The play environment has been compromised due to population pressures, pollution, and the dangers of congestion.

Despite these various benefits, opportunities for place-based learning experiences are becoming more limited. Mary Rivkin writes, “Children are losing their traditional play environment, which has traditionally been outdoors and in nature.  The play environment has been compromised due to population pressures, pollution, and the dangers of congestion. These changes have increased the need for supervised play, but at the same time it has become increasingly common for both parents to work. In an effort to keep children safe, their play areas and opportunities are restricted. Within the school playtime is being reduced in response to curriculum requirements.” Furthermore, the

University of Michigan study reports that elementary school teachers cite “lack of natural areas at the school site as a limiting factor in their ability to integrate outdoor spaces into the school curriculum.”

The philosophical and practical arguments for linking schools, youth and community through place-based learning are bolstered by this newly emerging research. The theories of change that underlie school programs based in communities focus on their potential for promoting healthy youth development, enhanced citizenship, improved employment preparation and improved academic outcomes. These outcomes are most likely in situations where the curriculum is framed around meaningful projects and issues and the learning experiences integrate both community-based and school-based elements – in other words, where the core tenets of place-based education are followed.

Endnotes