Place-Based Education at Island Community School

Abstract

This qualitative case study of Island Community School ¹ provides a detailed description of how one school incorporated place-based, environmentally conscious education over the course of more than a decade. The study explored the conditions that supported and constrained this approach in an isolated rural community. Data came primarily from interviews with educators, students, and community members but also from participant observation. Four themes helped explain relevant dynamics: leadership by the principal, interaction with seasonal residents, teachers' varied practices, and school culture invested in student inquiry. The research illustrated an approach that prepared students in one rural community with environmental awareness and skills that might serve them wherever they choose to live as adults.

Keywords:

• community-based education
• place-based education
• rural education

Notes

1. Island Community School is a pseudonym.

2. With Cuban (1993) and Kohn (2008) among others, we consider “progressive pedagogies” to involve a variety of teaching practices such as the following: focusing on the whole child, using collaborative or cooperative learning methods, seeking to make learning meaningful, engaging children in active rather than passive learning, using inductive rather than deductive teaching strategies, linking current learning to students' past experiences, emphasizing inquiry rather than rote learning and memorization, and using the community at large as a laboratory for learning. These authors contrast “progressive pedagogies” with “traditional pedagogies,” which tend to focus only on cognition, treat students as passive recipients of knowledge, discourage collaboration and group work, rely on memorization and drill and practice, teach already established facts and concepts rather than allowing students to discover concepts on their own, and consider the classroom as the primary site for teaching and learning.

3. Not only does this perspective come from the authors' own efforts to identify sites where place-based education is taking place, it is also reflected in the literature on this approach to pedagogy. A search of ERIC crossing the terms, “place-based” and “rural” yielded 156 documents, a search crossing the terms “place-based” and “urban” yielded 47 documents, and a search crossing the terms “place-based” and “suburban” yielded no documents.

4. The relationships among knowledge, attitudes, and behavior are matters of concern to numerous philosophers, psychologists, and educators, not just those with specific interest in environmental education. Nevertheless, among environmental educators are those who hold contrasting views on relevant points pertinent to these relationships (see e.g., Heimlich & Ardoin 2008).

5. We have presented information about some of the other sites as well as an extensive cross-case analysis in other papers and publications (e.g., Howley et al., 2010; Howley, Howley, Klein, Howley, Showalter, & Johnson, 2010).

6. This NSF-funded study began with a focus on place-based education that incorporated mathematics content. In several schools, however, we found that place-based methods were used more frequently in subjects other than mathematics. To map use of this approach, therefore, we often extended our inquiry to teachers other than those assigned to teach mathematics (and related subjects like science and industrial technology). At Island Community School, the interviewer had an opportunity to speak with most of the teachers at the school.

7. In the United States overall, 25% of families have incomes under $35,000, approximately 34% have incomes between $35,000 and $75,000, and approximately 41% have incomes at or above $75,000.

8. Using the same interview schedule with teachers at other schools in the set of seven case studies, we heard quite different responses to queries about textbook teaching, drill and practice, and standardized testing from those we heard at Island Community School. We do not therefore believe that responses from teachers at Island were seriously distorted by social desirability bias. These teachers had a different perspective from teachers at many of the other sites.