Page 213 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

Chapter 15
Place-Based (Science) Education:
Something Is Happening Here

Michiel van Eijck

“Something is happening here” (Sobel 2004, p. 1). This heading decorates the first
chapter of what is commonly considered a seminal work on place-based education.
Now, more than 5 years later, this statement also holds true for the accounts of
place-based education featured in this section. As well, this statement appears to be
reflective of the practice of academic research on place-based education.
Place-based education is often defined as a teaching–learning process that centers
on what is considered local – usually students’ own “place,” that is, their immediate
schoolyard, neighborhood, town, or community. Although the term “place-based
education” was coined by the end of the 1980s, its practices are much older. For
instance, in the beginning of the previous century, John Dewey (1915) already pro-
posed to situate student learning in the local environment. Nowadays, place-based
education is frequently enacted without flagging it explicitly as such.
In science education, place-based approaches have yielded outcomes that are
uncommon in formal education, but which nevertheless reveal gains in scientific
literacy. In all the examples featured in this section, we observe how the outcomes
of place-based education enter and are beneficial for the community at large, which,
by absorbing and “consuming” the products of learning, may undergo sustainable
change toward a more positive, environmentally healthy future. In this process, sci-
entific literacy develops as students expand both their control over the commons and
tools of production and their room to maneuver in the community.
Not surprisingly, environmental education has recently moved towards more
place-based approaches. Originally, environmental education dealt with rather
global, abstract environmental concepts, such as those related to ozone depletion,
toxic waste, and global warming – concepts that are often poorly understood by
students and that bear little effect in regard to students’ actions at the local level.
In part, place-based education can be considered a particular form of enacting

M. van Eijck
Eindhoven University of Technology

D.J. Tippins et al. (eds.), Cultural Studies and Environmentalism, 187
Cultural Studies of Science Education Vol. 3, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-3929-3_15,
© Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010