Page 315 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

24 Implications of Sense of Place and Place-Based Education 289

what roles the attributes of a place play in their lifeways, teachings, and history
(Cajete 2000); how important place is to individual or group identity (Proshansky
et al. 1983), and so on. Places may abide for centuries, like the pueblos of the
southwest USA; metamorphose, as in the growth of the city of Phoenix, Arizona,
atop Hohokam ruins; or weather away, like abandoned mining camps. Old place
names may be forgotten and new ones bestowed. Place-making itself is the only
constant in the cultural landscape.
But places are also part of the biological world, and humans are also attached to the
living entities and lifelike processes in particular places. Biologist Edward O. Wilson
argues in his biophilia hypothesis that humans are genetically predisposed to focus
attention and bond to the other forms of life in their environments (Wilson 1984).
While mainstream biology has a specific and limiting definition of what is living, some
cultures view meteorological, hydrological, and geological phenomena as animate
beings, life processes, persons, or consciousness; though possibly occurring at rates
different from what humans can resolve. In such cultures, relationships among
humans, fauna, flora, weather, and landforms may be described in kinship terms
(McNeley 1987). These overlap with what may be termed a “geophilic” connection:
influence of physiography on sense of place (Silko 1986).
Place-based (Elder 1998) or place-conscious education (Gruenewald 2003) situ-
ates teaching and learning in place by design. Ault (2008) describes it as the coherent
integration of place and discipline, ranging from the use of place only as context, for
example, in teaching disciplinary concepts, to wholesale reworking and melding
of disciplinary cognitive agendas so that “place itself becomes the principal object of
inquiry … leading to the enhancement of self and connection to community” (Ault
2008, p. 631). Place-based education, while still far from a mainstream approach, is
today practiced in a considerable variety of formal and informal settings. A number
of these have been richly catalogued by Sobel (2004) and Gruenewald and Smith
(2008), and on the websites PromiseOfPlace.org and PEECworks.org. Further, Orr
(1992) and Gruenewald (2003) have identified a number of more traditional academic
subjects and curricula appropriate for place-based synthesis.
Recently, stronger connections have been made between sense of place – previously
of interest mostly to geographers, environmental psychologists, architects, and
planners – and theory and practice of place-based education. Working in two
geographically and socioculturally distinct settings, Semken (2005) and Lim and
Calabrese Barton (2006) noted that students bring their own senses of place into any
learning environment or activity, and recommended that these senses of place should
be acknowledged and constructively leveraged by teacher and curriculum. Semken
and Butler Freeman (2008) argued that enrichment of sense of place in the course of
learning is a valid and assessable learning outcome of place-based education.
In summary, places are where we sense and connect to our natural and cultural
surroundings, and sense of place is a construct that usefully describes this connection.
Place-based education is situated in pedagogically fruitful places and leverages the
senses of place of students and teachers. It is highly relevant to environmental
ethics, conservation, ecological integrity, and cultural sustainability, because all of
these are also situated in places.