Place‐based education: breaking through the constraining regularities of public school

Abstract

Robert Stevenson identified four behavioural and programmatic regularities that have inhibited the implementation of environmental education as envisioned by the framers of the Belgrade Charter and Tbilisi Declaration. These include the presentation of standardised knowledge associated with established disciplines, reliance on teachers as primary information sources, assessment procedures based on ease of marking and justification, and the control of students. Place‐based education, an approach to curriculum development and school‐community relations that draws upon local cultural, environmental, economic and political concerns, is beginning to challenge these regularities. Although not yet widely practised, it promises a convergence of the social and environmental that in some places is transforming schools into sites where David Gruenewald’s vision of decolonisation and reinhabitation is being enacted.

Notes

1. Much of the following discussion is indebted to research completed by Caitlin Sampson as part of a senior thesis at Lewis & Clark College entitled ‘Environmental Education in the Public Eye: Reconciling Values in an Issues Analysis Curriculum.’