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PBE Links and Additional Readings

Additional Works Consulted

This article featured Michigan schools working to clean up the Great Lakes area as a way to learn while making a difference. The quotes it included from Greg Smith eventually helped us reach an understanding of how one makes the distinction between place-based education and environmental education. Place-based education incorporates environmental education, but environmental education does not inherently constitute place-based education. This is mostly because environmental education does not necessarily incorporate things like local history and culture alongside the environmental and scientific aspect.

This government-sponsored website provided us with an outline of what the standardized tests put forth by the Common Core movement might look like. We looked at it to see if we could find any information on how place-based education could be reconciled with standardized testing. Unfortunately, the testing is still too new to have any conclusive evidence besides the idealistic propaganda.

We looked at this website in our research on what different examples of place-based education can look like. This organization is affiliated with inner-city schools in San Francisco, CA and provides outdoor education opportunities to disadvantaged high school students at no cost to them. Despite the fact that it is not a school but an outside organization, it is an excellent example of place-based education because it synthesizes multiple academic subjects under the umbrella of environmental education projects.

We had trouble finding public schools that prominently advertised their use of place-based education, but we did find this charter school. We looked at their website to just see how the charter school movement and place-based education can intersect, though we did not end up talking about this intersection in our project.

This article showed us how place-based education can be used in a vocational-themed school after getting a response that mentioned vocational training as a good setting for place-based education in our anonymous survey. It features a school in British Columbia with a forestry program as an example of the shift towards project-based learning in that territory. It also gave an interesting perspective in that it featured a school relatively close to home, yet outside the U.S. and therefore unaffected by policies like NCLB and the Common Core.

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