What experiences have you had with PBE? by Delia Russo-Savage
I am from Montpelier, Vermont. Although Montpelier is the capital of Vermont, it is a small town with a tight-knit community. The public school system and the community I grew up in was always incredibly focused on providing opportunities to students for alternative learning. From a young age I can remember being involved in place-based learning both within and outside of the school community. The two most memorable experiences I have, with place-based education, happened during high school. One was with my AP Spanish class and the other was a Community Based Learning (CBL) project that I self designed.
The Community Based Learning program at my school is completely self designed and directed by the student. I was allowed to decide what topic or area I was interested in and from there I found a community partner with whom I could work. I had always been interested and had played around with the idea of becoming an obstetrician/gynecologist and so I decided to do my CBL in the womens and childrens unit in the local hospital. I contacted the hospital and, with the help of Matt McLane, the director of the CBL program at my school, I arranged to come in to the hospital every saturday morning and work as a volunteer. Through this experience I was able to perform many different tasks, such as answering the phone, stocking hospital rooms with materials needed for birth, as well as shadow a nurse. This experience allowed me the opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of what it means to be a nurse. To bring what I learned from this experience back to the learning goals of the program, I shared my experiences with other students who were a part of the CBL program and I wrote a paper about what I had learned.
The most memorable place-based learning I had was through my AP Spanish class. There is a very small Spanish-speaking population in my hometown. My teacher decided that it would be beneficial for the students in the AP Spanish class to be able to connect with a local organization to practice our language skills. Señora Sholk, our Spanish teacher, invited two members from this organization to come in to our classroom and share with us what they do for work. They informed us that they translate documents and work with migrant workers to make sure that they know what their rights are as workers in the United States. There are many migrant workers who work on farms in Vermont. A large majority of them speak Spanish and no English. Our class decided to work with this organization in two distinct ways.
The first way we worked with the organization was to translate a document from English to Spanish, detailing the housing rights migrant workers were entitled to. This was largely done in the classroom. We spent many class periods working in groups to translate the document for the organization into Spanish.
The second part of this place-based learning experience was to go to the farms and speak with the migrant workers. Not only did we give the document, that we had translated into Spanish, to the organization to spread throughout farms in Vermont, we also brought the document with us when we went to visit the farm. The main reason we went to the farm, however, was to speak with migrant workers in Spanish. This allowed us to not only have the opportunity to practice our Spanish speaking skills, but also to learn more about this community that existed in Vermont, which otherwise we may have never had the chance to interact with. We informally interviewed the workers about their experiences in the United States, on the farms and also about their lives back in Mexico.
Finally, this experience was incredibly valuable for the following four reasons. It allowed me to practice my Spanish speaking skills and connected me with a Spanish speaking population in Vermont. It also made me aware of an organization in my hometown that worked directly with migrant rights and gave me the opportunity to gain experience with translating documents.
Featured Image: http://www.findyourspot.com/VT/Montpelier