Page 317 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

24 Implications of Sense of Place and Place-Based Education 291

historian and critic Lewis Mumford, an adherent of Geddes, revived the concept of
the regional survey in Values for Survival (Mumford 1946), a collection of essays
strongly influenced by wartime events and the ascent of technology. Mumford
believed that authentic synthesis of humanities and science was needed to provide
a check on what he saw as the disproportionate social and political influence of the
latter. He proffered Geddes’s regional survey as
the backbone of a drastically revised method of study, in which every aspect of the sciences
and the arts is ecologically related from the bottom up, in which they connect directly and
constantly in the student’s experience of his region and his community. (Mumford 1946, p.
151–152)
Mumford elaborated on two attributes of the regional survey that today are typically
associated with place-based education (e.g., Gruenewald 2003): that its centered
but outwardly expanding focus of attention mirrors a child’s, and then a student’s,
developmentally increasing awareness of the surroundings; and that it situates the
study of nature in the context of human interactions with nature. Mumford also
recognized that the student’s subjective relationships with local environments and
communities were integral to the regional survey, presaging the role of sense of
place in place-based teaching and learning (discussed below), although he probably
had no conception of the term.
It is apparent that these proponents of what is now referred to as place-based
education were motivated primarily by interests in child development and socialization.
This is implicit acknowledgment of the indispensable role of places in forming
human perceptive abilities and identity (Casey 1996). But whereas environmental
consciousness has always been at the heart of Indigenous place-based teaching and
learning (Cajete 2000), it did not likewise imbue mainstream writings on place-
based models of education until after the watershed times that saw publication of
influential books such as Silent Spring (Carson 1962), The Population Bomb
(Ehrlich 1969), The Limits to Growth (Meadows, Meadows, Randers and Behrens
Meadows et al. 1972), and Diet for a Small Planet (Lappé 1975); as well as the
emergence of the philosophy of bioregionalism (Berg and Dasmann 1978).
In environmental education, David Orr’s Ecological Literacy (Orr 1992) is
considered by many to be a comparably seminal work. Synthesizing quantitative
data with critical reviews of philosophers and scholars from Bacon to Thoreau to
Lovelock, Orr forcefully argued that contemporary models of education, fixated on
classical works and afflicted by overspecialization, have abetted anthropogenic
damage to environmental systems. To Orr, a universal symptom of mainstream
learning, found in teachers and students alike, is “deplacement,” manifested not only
as ignorance of local natural and cultural history, but also as a diminished capacity
to teach or learn through observation and physical interaction with surroundings. Orr
described this estrangement of pedagogy from place as both unsustainable and
irremediable from within the current system. His alternative is explicitly situated in
place, infusing Dewey’s experiential curriculum and Geddes’s and Mumford’s
regional survey with environmental inquiry and an ethical commitment to preservation
of life and habitat (Leopold 1966). Orr named two important outcomes of this