Putting Geography Education into Place: What Geography Educators Can Learn from Place-Based Education, and Vice Versa

Abstract

In recent years, geography educators have sought to make their pedagogy relevant to pressing social and environmental issues, but these efforts have largely imported pedagogies from outside of geography. In place-based education, in contrast, place—one of geography’s defining themes—serves as a central organizing principle for a socially relevant pedagogy. This article reviews the pedagogy of place-based education and compares it to current practices in geography education. The argument is that integrating the approaches of place-based education can make geography education more relevant and that a geographic perspective can help place-based education programs more effectively promote social justice and environmental sustainability.

Keywords:

• fieldwork
• pedagogy
• place-based education

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by a Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation, Grant #DGE-0750756. In addition, I wish to thank the editor and two anonymous reviewers for helpful suggestions, and the participants in a reading group on Place-based Education at Penn State University in fall 2009, where many of the arguments of this article were developed. Colleagues Greg Lankenau, Kai Schafft, Roger Downs, Margareta Lelea, Peter Howe, and Jessica Arends all provided very helpful feedback on drafts of this article. An earlier version of this article was presented in the Gail Hobbs Student Paper Competition of the Geography Education Specialty Group at the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers in April 2010. The author thanks the competition judges for their feedback.

Notes

1. The recent publication of a Teacher’s Notebook article in this journal on place-based approaches to GIS education (Perkins et al. 2010) is an encouraging sign that geography educators are becoming more aware of place-based education; however, while the authors describe a useful and effective approach to teaching geographic concepts using local examples, they do not engage with the broader social purpose of place-based education, at least in the article cited here.

2. As Bednarz (1999) points out, fieldwork has been less commonly practiced in U.S. K–12 education than in other countries and at the postsecondary level; however, the fact that this omission is notable and the many efforts she chronicles to promote field-based geography education both indicate the centrality of fieldwork to the disciplinary imagination.

3. For a helpful compilation of several more examples of place-based education in practice, see Gruenewald and Smith (2008).