What’s Place-Based Education?

About

Place-Based

Education

 

 

 

“I think of the place as being where we exist in time and space that informs who we are on a physical, emotional, mental and spiritual level.”--Matt Schlein, Willowell Executive Director

At Willowell, we define place-based education as pedagogy in which schools base learning and teaching on their community's economy, culture, history and ecology and involve community members in this learning and teaching.  Place-based education, or education rooted in place, is not meant to be taught in addition to the regularly scheduled curriculum: rather, place is the lens through which concepts in mathematics, social science, language arts, and all other subjects are explored and taught.

 

Place-based education’s purposes and practices draw from such diverse traditions as outdoor education, experiential education, problem-based learning, contextual learning, indigenous education, critical pedagogy, and many other approaches that are focused on context and the value of education rooted in particular regions or communities.

 

Through hands-on, community-based learning experiences, place-based education promotes student and community nature literacy and inspires ethics of local and global citizenship, ecological and cultural stewardship, and decision-making anchored in knowledge of place.  While this type of learning deepens and supports people’s sense of local places, it also offers this understanding as a lens through which to understand global social and ecological relationships.

Kyle Bradley, 7th-grader at Vergennes Union Middle School, lights his

 

Though our focus at the Willowell Foundation has primarily been on rural, central-Vermont schools, place-based education is applicable in all socio-economic and geographical settings: from urban to rural, from small to large schools. Place-based education broadens the definition of “environment” to include natural and built environments as well as community and cultural environments in which people live.

 

At the Willowell Foundation, we work with public school teachers from Vermont schools in three districts to develop curriculum that connects students across disciplines, beyond school walls and over town lines. Using our land in Monkton, Vermont, as an outdoor classroom and locus for pilot projects, we focus on creating inter-disciplinary projects that are directly connected to students’ real experiences in their home communities. Environmental ethics, environmental and communal sustainability, and local and global citizenship are the driving forces behind our work.