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Place-Based Education: Connecting Classrooms and Communities

Posted on: Friday, 14 March 2008, 06:00 CDT

By Sala, Scott

Place-Based Education: Connecting Classrooms and Communities, by David Sobel. 2004. Great Barrington, MA: The Orion Society. Paper. 116 pages. $8.00. ISBN 0-913098-55-8 How many field trips have you taken lately, teachers and parents? In many schools, this era of high-stakes testing has led to their virtual cessation. Moreover, even when children leave the classroom for zoos or museums, their visits can be unconnected and disjointed. How often have you seen students rushing from exhibit to exhibit, perhaps filling out a line or two on a worksheet?

Environmental education materials should provide an appropriate and necessary response to these trends by rejuvenating and sustaining students' connections to their environment, but some environmental education curricula lack substantial conceptual frameworks. The absence of a framework creates problems: Because many environmental curriculum guides are simply compendiums of nominally related activities, lacking an instructional focus, children spend less time on projects with an environmental focus. In essence, we are communicating to students that environmental education is a subject that they study for a limited time each year in a haphazard way. It is vital to reintegrate environmental education into the school curriculum.

In Place-Based Education: Connecting Classrooms and Communities, David Sobel presents a concise, thoughtful argument for broadening and deepening environmental education, thereby transforming it to "environment as an integrating context (EIC)" (p. 9). He promotes a "pedagogy of place" or place-based education and argues for the "necessary interpenetration of school, community, and environment, whether it is urban, suburban, or rural" (p. 11).

Sobel sidesteps discussions of the purposes and usefulness of high-stakes testing and describes the findings of a report from the State Education and Environmental Roundtable (SEER), a coalition of 16 U.S. state departments of education that collected data from 40 schools in 12 states that were using EIC-based methods. His reporting of the data is anecdotal, and SEER's research methods are unclear. However, the data show that schools using an EIC model report (a) greater gains in standardized test scores in comparison with non-EIC schools and (b) qualitative gains in such areas as problem solving and critical thinking, among many other positive effects (p. 28).

Sobel points out that any school can develop an EIC model because distant travel is not required. He makes clear what is required:

If teachers and administrators are attentive to the particularities of the place, climate, community organizations, environmental learning centers, and parental concerns, then unique species of curriculum and project-based learning will evolve. (p. 10)

In short, he asks for reintegrating the community into the school. Over the past decades, communities have consistently asked schools to provide services (e.g., school breakfasts, before and after school care, social work and health care services) that other societal institutions (e.g. the family or other community groups) formerly provided. Sobel recognizes that

While we all started out thinking that our focus was on school improvement and academic achievement, we have come to realize that our focus is equally on creating vital communities and preserving the quality of the environment. (p. 36)

Through this confluence of schools, environment, and communities, the value and power of place-based education becomes apparent.

From elementary school composting and recycling programs to high school water monitoring and playground naturalization projects, examples of EIC projects span grade levels in urban, suburban, and rural areas. They always include two guiding principles: "maximizing ownership through partnerships" and engaging students in "real- world projects in the local environment and the com-munity" (p. 54). All of the pieces are there awaiting the cohesive force that a dedicated teacher or school staff can supply.

For more guidelines, Sobel offers the following new philosophical directions as the foundation for the place-based education (pp. 16- 23):

1. From Extraction to Sustainability as the Underlying Metaphor focuses on ways to establish and maintain a balance of resources on local and global planes.

2. From Fragmentations to Systems Thinking as a Conceptual Model focuses on the reintegration of sometimes artificially separated curricular areas.

3. From Here-and-Now to Long-Ago as a Developmental Guideline for the Curriculum Design focuses on connecting younger students to nearby locales as a foundation for connecting students to places further removed.

4. From Mandated Monoculture to Emergent Diversity as a School District Goal focuses on recognizing and celebrating student diversity in achievement and culture.

These new directions lead to six essential strategies in the creation of the place-based schooling, which include some unlikely proposals-such as providing an environmental educator for every school (p. 53)-and some important opportunities, such as building connections through community processes (p. 57) or improving programs though continuing professional development. A balance is achieved through the domains of "curriculum integration, schoolyard enhancement, community based education, and school sustainability" (p. 61).

To shift thinking within a school and develop such a program may seem a daunting task, but Sobel describes the efforts of several projects, such as the Bay Schools Project, a collaboration between the Maryland State Department of Education and the Chesapeake Foundation that coordinates a variety of projects in and around the Chesapeake Bay. Local businesses provide financial support.

Sobel presents strong evidence for choosing to move beyond environmental education in its strictest sense to a place-based model that promotes and strengthens the connections between larger constituencies. Those arguments and his directions for and examples of community-school collaboration provide a clear blueprint for future action in other communities.

SCOTT SALA

Denver, CO, Public Schools

Copyright Heldref Publications Fall 2007

(c) 2007 Journal of Environmental Education, The. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.

Source: Journal of Environmental Education, The

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