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You
are here: Learning from the Land: The Power of Place
Everything looks different, including education, when we bear in mind that the world is beautiful. -John Elder, Stories in the Land, page 8
"Those are birch trees!" I exclaimed with some satisfaction as we cruised into the Russian countryside, struggling with our limited Russian. "Betula papyrifera" replied the one naturalist among the Russian educators. "Yes! Dah! I know that one!" Ahh . . . there's nothing like familiarity in a strange place at a stressful time.
Then again, there's nothing like the thrill of an almost totally foreign world, either. I recall my Michigan friend, Dilip, waking on his first morning of a winter backpack trip in the Grand Canyon. His eyes were lit with wonder: "This place seems like how I'd envision the moon if it came to life."
Considerations of place are growing in many educational environments. Primary school teachers are told that children should learn first about the amazing animals in their own part of the world before studying dinosaurs and tropical rainforests. Service learning emphasizes bringing students into the communities in which they live. Adventure education emphasizes the value of taking people into new and strange worlds.
Places play two critical yet distinct roles in laying the backdrop for successful education. The first is helping learners to connect with home and community. The second is challenging learners to see the world with new eyes, by exposing them to strange new worlds.
With the advent of modern society, place got lost in the compartmentalization and institutionalization of education. Looking back to how people learned before education was separated from everyday life, landscapes taught children about geography; plant and animal life taught them math and science skills; by sustaining the people, this inspired the development of skills needed for survival and creativity; and stories from the land taught children communication skills as well as about their culture and morals. With the expansion of human knowledge came the impossibility of knowing everything, and thus the compartmentalizing of knowledge. Within our current urban society, survival skills sometimes involve computing sums or writing reports, instead of finding shelter and gathering food. The arts offer more varied media, and more sources for inspiration.
These changes were both bad and good, and now many wise people are reflecting on the value of regaining some of what we lost: the sense of community, integrated learning, and education with apparent practical application for the learner. Place-based education is one way of bringing some of that holistic, active learning back into the child's life experience. This demonstrates a connection between the classroom and the child's world outside of academia.
This does not mean that tropical rainforests and dinosaurs should not be taught in the classroom. Children are passionate about these captivating worlds! It simply means that children will also be fascinated by their own nearby worlds, if they are given the opportunity to discover them, and learn about them. This includes the urban homes of many children, as well as the nearby wilder places that require a school bus (and sometimes an overnight bag!) to see. It includes the people of their home communities and the experience of how their water, food and clothes arrive in their neighborhoods, and where it all goes when we throw it away.
And, as people develop a sense of place within their own communities, we can also offer them the thrill of discovering new and different worlds . . . and making the connection between their experiences in strange places with their lives closer to home.
Outdoor, experiential, environmental, and adventure educators have known for generations that place can have a significant impact on student learning. In the 1950's, school camping was viewed as an excellent setting in which to build citizenship among the nation's youth. Since then, residential experiences for school children, Outward Bound-style adventure programs, and the field of wilderness therapy have surged in number and quality, both in the United States and in many other parts of the world.
When places are actively sensed, the physical landscape becomes wedded to the landscape of the mind, to the roving imagination, and where the mind may lead is anybody's guess.
-Keith Basso, "Wisdom Sits in Places" (Feld and Basso, p. 55)Considerations of place are surging again in many progressive environments. In "Experiential Learning: A Teacher's Perspective", Tom Herbert recommends taking students away from places of established practices -- into fresh environments with new stimuli (Horwood, 1995, p. 30). Among adventure leaders, many have experienced the impact of learning in unusual, wild, or beautiful places -- and thus become advocates of the wilderness experience.
Having taught in natural settings from the coast to mountain peaks, I have observed many students, inspired by a place, stop and contemplate the significance of what they are doing and learning. Facilitating student reflection on their experience means providing the time and the place, and sometimes the discussion, for them to make connections that they themselves are best able to make.
. . . our pressing need now is for a pedagogy that exposes people to the range of their possible relationships in the world, and that gives them the language and models to explore and express such affiliation within a vivid community of values. -John Elder, Stories in the Land, page 12.Place-based education is, first and foremost, an effort to help learners to make connections. If we as educators can help our students to feel connected to their homes, their communities, and the natural worlds that surround them (no matter from how far away), then we will be taking the first step towards a caring citizenry that understands-- and thus cares about and for-- their places on the planet. Through place-based experiences that inspire and empower, students will become the citizens this planet needs to sustain humanity and ecosystems across the globe.
References
Elder, John, Ed. (1998) Stories in the Land: A Place-Based Environmental Education Anthology. Great Barrington, MA: The Orion Society .
Feld, Steven and Keith Basso, eds. (1996) Senses of Place. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press .
Horwood, Bert. (1995) Experience and the Curriculum. Boulder, Colorado: Association for Experiential Education .
Denise Dumouchel, M.S.Ed., has worked in residential environmental education in the U.S. and overseas for over 15 years. After five years as Education Director for the Headlands Institute in California, she taught school and pursued a Ph.D. in Environmental Studies, focusing her doctoral thesis on effective approaches to professional development for educators. She left a position as Assistant Professor of Environmental Education at Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania to join IslandWood, where she is currently School and Teacher Programs Coordinator. Education: B.A., University of Rochester; M.S.Ed., Northern Illinois University; Ph.D. candidate, Environmental Studies, Antioch University / New England. You may reach Denise by emailing denised@islandwood.org.
© May 2003 New Horizons for Learning
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