Page 316 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

290 S. Semken and E. Brandt

Evolution of Place-Based Educational Philosophy
Toward Sustainability

Although the term “place-based education” was not used and may not have existed
before the late 1990s (Elder 1998), the prosocial value of contextualizing learning
in local physical and cultural environments has long been understood. Indigenous
knowledge systems and philosophies of education have always been place-based:
invested with culturally defined biophilic and geophilic place attachment, and
informed by long-term observation of and reflection on natural processes and systems,
phenology, animal behavior, and human history. Place-based Indigenous teachings
serve to empower successive generations to thrive communally and self-sufficiently
amid the climatic, hydrologic, and ecological patterns and cycles specific to their
homelands (Kawagley and Barnhardt 1999).
In contrast, this philosophy appeared only sporadically, and each time briefly,
throughout the early history of EuroAmerican formal education. In the first 2
decades of the nineteenth century, progressive Swiss educator Johann Heinrich
Pestalozzi experimented with pedagogy we would today recognize as place-based
(Hutchison 1998):
Through lessons in map and model-making. … Pestalozzi pioneered the study of place
in childhood by having his students explore [local] terrain and topography. (Hutchison
1998, p. 84)
In the USA, as compulsory public education for children was widely instituted
in the middle-to-late nineteenth century, strongly influenced by a “Prussian
model” of uniform, decontextualized curricula and teacher training (Cousin 1834),
the educational philosopher John Dewey (1916) advocated instead for active,
experiential learning situated in a child’s immediate social and physical surround-
ings. He named history and geography (both cultural and physical), disciplines
fundamentally tied to place, as the most important studies in the curriculum
(Dewey 1916). Dewey argued that the prevailing curricula and practices were,
even then, overspecialized and largely irrelevant to children’s home and community
life. Yet his perspective was not simply parochial; he viewed learning situated in
place as “the natural starting point … for moving out into the unknown, not an end
in itself” (Dewey 1916, p. 212). But institutionalized schooling, with its emphasis
on efficiency and compliance, functioned synergistically with the political and
corporate workings of an increasingly industrial and consumerist society (Callahan
1964), so Dewey’s recommendations went mostly unheeded.
During the interval between the two World Wars, the idea of a “regional survey,”
a grassroots movement to study and teach about nature in local environments,
emerged from the earlier writings and subsequent passionate advocacy of Scottish
biologist and urban planner Patrick Geddes (1904, 1905). The movement flourished
only briefly in the 1920s and only in Great Britain and the new Soviet Union, in
part probably because the curriculum was never well-defined and the concept was
mostly of interest to academicians (Meller 1994). Two decades later, American