What is Place Based Education?
Place-based education is the process of using the local community and environment as a starting point to teach concepts in language arts, mathematics, social studies, science and other subjects across the curriculum, immersing students in local heritage, cultures, landscapes, opportunities and experiences. The approach promotes learning that is rooted in what is local—the unique history, environment, culture, economy, literature, and art of a particular place—students’ own schoolyard, neighborhood, town or community.
Also known as pedagogy of place, localized learning, experiential education, or community-based education, place-based education is an interactive learning style that encourages students to develop deeper environmental and social connections with their local communities. In addition to preparing students academically, teachers who adopt this approach present learning as intimately tied to environmental stewardship and community development, aiming to cultivate in the young the desire and ability to become involved citizens committed to enhancing the welfare of both the human and more-than-human communities of which they are a part.
Place-based education is a multidisciplinary approach to education which draws from a variety of purposes and practices, including experiential learning, contextual learning, problem-based learning, constructivism, outdoor education, democratic education, multicultural education, and service learning.
Origins & Lineage
It can be argued that place-based education, while not identified as such, originated with indigenous and other traditional ways of teaching children, involving an effort to restore learning experiences that were once the basis of children’s acculturation and socialization prior to the invention of formal schools. In the background of place-based education are the ideas of early 20th century American philosopher John Dewey, who in his 1916 book Democracy and Education argued that schools needed to move away from memorization of received knowledge to experiential learning.
The term “place-based education” was coined in the early 1990s by Laurie Lane-Zucker of The Orion Society and Dr. John Elder of Middlebury College. Although educators have used its principles for some time, the approach was developed initially by The Orion Society, a Massachusetts-based nonprofit organization, as well as Professor David Sobel, Project Director at Antioch University New England. Orion’s early work in the area of place-based education was funded by the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation.
David Sobel is an American educator and academic responsible for developing the philosophy of place-based education, having written extensively on the topic in books and numerous articles. His 2004 book Place-Based Education: Connecting Classrooms and Communities became the first comprehensive text devoted to the approach. Gregory A. Smith, Professor in the Graduate School of Education and Counseling at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, speaks nationally and internationally about place- and community-based education and is involved with efforts in schools in the Pacific Northwest to adopt this approach to teaching and learning.
Running parallel to these environmentally focused efforts, teachers and administrators in rural schools throughout the United States implemented curriculum tied to local culture, beginning with the Foxfire project in Rabun Gap, Georgia in the late 1960s, where teachers invited students to engage in cultural journalism, investigating traditional practices and history and publishing their findings in regional journals.
How It’s Practiced
Place-based education is a student-centered form of learning that heavily emphasizes inquiry into topics of importance in the community, centering the educational process in the environment and requiring that teachers place students in their communities so they can solve community-based problems. Place-based learning encourages students to explore their local communities, learn about history, and develop critical thinking skills.
Classroom activities range widely: students may practice using maps of their local area before going into the field or analyze data on their chosen topic, delving into the specific history of their local community. Even locations with seemingly barren landscapes become rich learning environments—students looking closely might find insects that become their whole curriculum, or discover abandoned infrastructure that reveals local history.
The Cottonwood School of Civics and Science in Portland, Oregon provides opportunities for students to actively build relationships locally through on-going restoration efforts in nearby natural areas, creating exhibits for local cultural museums, and researching and proposing policy-based solutions to community problems, such as interviewing Vietnam War veterans and collecting their stories for educational brochures.
Primary principles include rooting all place-based education heavily in inquiry-based learning and a hands-on approach, taking place in the community, and having students learn in a way that is rooted in the local context while developing solutions that could potentially be applied globally.
Place Based Education Today
Place-based education is taking root in urban and rural, northern and southern, well-to-do and rough-around-the-edges schools and communities across the country. Schools implement the approach through dedicated programs, individual teacher initiatives, and whole-school restructuring. Some institutions use their city’s many spaces as classrooms—art museums, university lecture halls, libraries, community centers, and parks serve as foundations for lessons firmly anchored in standard curriculum requirements.
There are a number of identified challenges that relate to place-based education approaches, as it is still widely perceived as an innovative and unconventional pedagogical approach. The main barrier for place-based education stems from insufficient teacher training together with restricted access to professional development resources.
Some literature on place-based education refers to a critical pedagogy of place, which frames the foundational relationships between settler colonialism and place, aiming to underscore the ways in which place in Global North contexts is rooted in systems of white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and anthropocentrism, focusing on deepening knowledge of cultural histories and deconstructing existing oppressive relationships. Land education is framed as an extension of place-based education that specifically centers Indigenous knowledge and relationships, and challenges settler colonialism in education.
Common Misconceptions
Place-based education is not the same as outdoor education: outdoor education is defined by being outside; place-based education is defined by learning rooted in a local place (indoors or outdoors). Not all programs that call themselves place-based incorporate community development and environmental stewardship elements, nor do all include opportunities for students to participate in projects that benefit others and the natural world, though this is the aspirational goal of place-based education and what sets it apart from similar approaches.
According to this pedagogy, grade school students often lose what place-based educators call their “sense of place” through focusing too quickly or exclusively on national or global issues—this is not to say that international and domestic issues are peripheral to place-based education, but that students should first have a grounding in the history, culture and ecology of their surrounding environment before moving on to broader subjects.
Place-based education has potential limitations that deserve careful consideration, drawing on critiques by scholars like Chet Bowers and Jan Nespor—it is a powerful, generative, and yet inherently problematic educational idea that demands critical interrogation, particularly in the current global climate of inward-looking nationalist and place-based politics. In much of the literature, the notion of place is represented in an idealized way as a stable, bounded and self-contained entity rather than something in the making. Many programs lack a critical dimension, focusing solely on improving educational achievements.
How to Begin
Educators need not redesign entire curricula to try place-based education—starting small with resources accessible locally like local maps, data, history, or a short local observation activity connected to existing standards is sufficient. Easy examples to try include schoolyard observations, local history investigations, citizen science data collection, or a community-based question students research and present.
For deeper understanding, David Sobel’s Place-Based Education: Connecting Classrooms and Communities (2004) remains the foundational text. Gregory A. Smith and David Sobel’s Place- and Community-Based Education in Schools (2010) provides a comprehensive primer with multiple practice examples. Place- and community-based education addresses two critical gaps in the experience of many children: contact with the natural world and contact with community, offering a way to extend young people’s attention beyond the classroom to the world as it actually is.