Hello! Welcome to my concentration page.
As an Environmental Studies major, I am required to propose a concentration during the fall semester of my sophomore year. During this time, I worked with my peers as well as the Environmental Studies Steering Committee to formulate a situated concentration in place-based education. You can follow the thought process I went through by reading my blog posts.
Below, you will find my approved concentration. I hope to add to it and expand my knowledge in this field throughout my studies at Lewis & Clark and abroad.
Place-based education utilizes the surrounding landscape and culture of an area to situate learning and bring up social and ecological issues relevant to places people actually inhabit (Gruenewald 2003). The “place” in place-based education brings many aspects of a person’s surroundings into consideration, including but not limited to the biota, historical uses, communities, and interpersonal relationships. Combined, these interdisciplinary aspects create a person’s environment. This “environment” is separate from the recent construction of “the environment,” which has become an intangible idea that seems to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Therefore, “if environment is that which surrounds, the ways we are connected to our surroundings are not universal; they are place-specific” (Proctor 2014). In order to promote a more complete understanding and respect for global issues, perhaps we must first gain a deeper understanding of our specific place in the world.
Place-based education is not new. In fact, it has been around since at least 1897, when John Dewey proposed it in an essay urging people to take multiple disciplines and a community focus into account (Orr 1992). Flash-forward a century, add six billion people, and our priorities seem to have changed. The changing perceptions of the leading world issues shape the direction of our educational practices (Nieto 2005). In an age where social mobility is one of the main focuses of our school systems (Labaree 1997), the individualistic tendencies we know are valued in our society do not teach us to share and respect the place we live, contributing to what Hardin (1968) terms “the tragedy of the commons.” I plan to study place-based education because I think it holds potential as an educational practice that might convey the changing ideas about the goals of education.
Place does not only encompass the natural surroundings of an area, but also the surrounding community. In the United States, “the number of children in our public schools who represent backgrounds other than European American is growing rapidly” (Nieto 2005). With a growing immigrant population, more and more students are uprooted from their hometowns and thrown into a foreign community. I would like to study how this lack of rooted connection to place affects their drive to make a difference in the community. Perhaps by utilizing the social surroundings, students could interview community members who could play “a critical role in supporting a situated and narrative mode of interpretation and construction of our sense of place and heritage” (Kudryavtsev 2012). Not only is it important to pay attention to the ecological surroundings, but it is also important to take into account the surrounding community and the bountiful resources it holds.
Place-based education is particularly interesting to study in late-industrialized countries because “our lives are lived amidst the architectural expressions of deplacement” (Orr 1992). We live surrounded by shopping malls, skyscrapers, and homogeneous suburban communities that are not unique to a particular location. Consequently, the study of place would need to go deeper than just the physical aspects of a community. Additionally, although late-industrialized countries tend to have greater numbers of students enrolled in higher education institutions, they also tend to have the highest rates of carbon emissions. Although many people hold on to the belief that an educated population will know not to pollute or clear-cut or overconsume, it seems that the current education system falls short of promoting any kind of change our actions. One possibility might be to incorporate place-based learning into school curriculums. I would like to further study the effects of a rooted sense of place on students and how that affects their learning and future actions.
Sources
Gruenewald, David. 2003. “The Best of Both Worlds: A Critical Pedagogy of Place.” Educational Researcher 32 (4): 3-12.
Hardin, Garrett. 1968. “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Science 162 (3859): 1243–48.
Kudryavtsev, Alex, Richard C. Stedman, and Marianne E. Krasny. 2012. “Sense of Place in Environmental Education.” Environmental Education Research 18 (2): 229–50. doi:10.1080/13504622.2011.609615.
Labaree, D. F. 1997. “Public Goods, Private Goods: The American Struggle Over Educational Goals.” American Educational Research Journal 34 (1): 39–81. doi:10.3102/00028312034001039.
Nieto, Sonia. 2005. “Public Education in the Twentieth Century and beyond: High Hopes, Broken Promises, and an Uncertain Future.” Harvard Educational Review 75 (1): 43–64.
Orr, David W. 1992. Ecological Literary: Education and the Transition to a Postmodern World. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Proctor, James. 2014. “Replacing Nature in Environmental Studies and Sciences.” Submitted for consideration to Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences.