Place-Based Learning
What is Place-Based Learning?
In place-based learning, faculty take students beyond the classroom and into the field (broadly defined) in order to learn from the natural world, the built environment, and the communities in which their educational institutions are situated. Place-based pedagogy challenges fundamental assumptions of what theorist David A. Gruenewald has termed “the increasingly placeless institution of schooling” (620).
While traditional pedagogies confine students within campuses and classrooms that are set apart from the local community and direct their attention overwhelmingly away from local people, places, and ideas, place-based pedagogies connect students to the local community and environment as a crucial source of learning and knowledge. Students then develop the ability to connect local knowledge to other contexts while recognizing that problems and solutions will vary by place.
“places themselves have something to say. Human beings, in other words, must learn to listen”
–David A. Gruenewald (624)
Why engage in place-based learning?
Proponents of place-based learning have interpreted the placelessness of traditional educational models as complicit with exploitative global economies that view people and places as objects to “manipulate, neglect, and destroy” in pursuit of profit (Gruenewald 624). Place-based pedagogies are situated within justice-focused or liberatory models of teaching and learning that seek to intervene in systems of exploitation and oppression. Place-based pedagogies resist these systems by orienting individuals and institutions toward humanistic and ecological values. Instructors resist placeless or rootless (Zencey) education by designing courses that invite students to inhabit, study, and learn from spaces and places—the natural world, local communities—left in the shadows by traditional educational institutions (Gruenewald 633).
Examples of place-based learning
- In a Botany course, students engage in a scavenger hunt, created by the professor, to locate a few dozen plants and trees scattered around campus. They then research which of the species (if any) are native to the area, and as a class create a walking tour of native species that can serve as a resource for local schools and community members.
- In Histories and Stories of Race, an FYS about how race influences individuals’ experiences of American society, students read Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black Struggle for Freedom (1980) and visit the International Civil Rights Center and Museum, among other historic sites, to learn about the experience of Black residents of the area where they are attending college.
Recommended Reading
- Bayer, Ellen & Judson Byrd Finley. “Out of the Classroom and Into the Wild: Ecopedagogies in Action.” Ecopedagogies: Practical Approaches to Experiential Learning, edited by Ellen Bayer and Judson Byrd Finley, 2023.
- Gruenewald, David A.. “Foundations of Place: A Multidisciplinary Framework for Place-Conscious Education.” American Educational Research Journal, vol. 40, no. 3, 2023, pp. 619–654.
- Zencey, Eric. “The Rootless Professors.” Rooted in the Land: Essays on Community and Place, edited by William Vitek and Wes Jackson, Yale UP, 1996, pp. 32-36.
Works Cited
- Gruenewald, David A.. “Foundations of Place: A Multidisciplinary Framework for Place-Conscious Education.” American Educational Research Journal, vol. 40, no. 3, 2023, pp. 619–654.
- Zencey, Eric. “The Rootless Professors.” Rooted in the Land: Essays on Community and Place, edited by William Vitek and Wes Jackson, Yale UP, 1996, pp. 32-36.