Citizenship and community are found at the heart of place-based activities. They fall across many disciplines. These activities will activities as a mosaic of outcomes focused about a specific problem. Some will address specific current outcomes while others will review earlier learning and yet others will create interest in outcomes yet to be addressed. Finding activities that address specific curricular outcomes may be restrictive view about how such activities serve the larger educational purpose.
What does educational research say about place-based education?
Dewey conceived an ‘experiential’ approach to education as a lifelong endeavor to cultivating dynamic interactions among self, culture and community. Crucially, this required time, rigor, the inclusion of criteria, reflections, and highly purposive actions for both students and teachers. Over the following decades, experiential education or experiential learning have come to be associated with a variety of methods, techniques, and interpretations that “move away from…. purely cognitive activities to those which actively use experiences (previous or newly provoked), work with them to draw learning from them, and locate them in specific contexts (either authentic or contrived)”.
The buttons below provide more in-depth descriptions of the related education research.
Community Involvement
Research related to the educational value of community in instructional processes. |
Real World Experiences
Research related to the educational value of linking learning with real world events. |