Place-based Curriculum Design

Exceeding Standards through Local Investigations

Amy B. Demarest

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317746775
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Curricula

Place-based Curriculum Design provides pre-service and practicing teachers both the rationale and tools to create and integrate meaningful, place-based learning experiences for students. Practical, classroom-based curricular examples illustrate how teachers can engage the local and still be accountable to the existing demands of federal, state, and district mandates. Coverage includes connecting the curriculum to students' outside-of-school lives; using local phenomena or issues to enhance students' understanding of discipline-based questions; engaging in in-depth explorations of local issues and events to create cross-disciplinary learning experiences, and creating units or sustained learning experiences aimed at engendering social and environmental renewal. An on-line resource (www.routledge.com/9781138013469) provides supplementary materials, including curricular templates, tools for reflective practice, and additional materials for instructors and students.

PART I Place-based Education

Theory and Practice

Local learning has come to be known as place- or community-based education, terms used to include a wide variety of intentions and practices. At the heart of this approach is the ability to structure curriculum around authentic investigations that bring students out into the community. In the pursuit of local questions, teachers and students develop partnerships with specific locales, community organizations, commercial enterprises, and individuals that provide the context for content acquisition, engaged learning, and meaningful community service.

Using local questions as the foundation of curriculum design integrates elements of a number of different educational traditions, including inquiry, standards-based curriculum design, project- and problem-based learning, and associated best practices. While this approach is not new, place-based education shares an allegiance to many things on which we have made progress. We now know more about:

• the individual nature of learning,
• ways to identify measurable outcomes in relation to intended goals,
• examining student work to ground teacher practice and steer school reform,
• what excellent work in the context of community might look like, and
• how to forge authentic partnerships between students, teachers, and community members.

Such a convergence of exemplary practices presents a transformative approach to education that engages learners as researchers, meaning-makers, and problem-solvers. The work students do is more rigorous, different, and “bigger” than the work happening in most schools and is a challenge for teachers on many levels. As one teacher put it, “The work that the students were doing got so big; it kept bumping in to regular school.” When teachers use local questions to fuel their curriculum, they offer young people a vibrant context for traditional knowledge and skills, as well as enduring lessons about how to live their lives peacefully and productively in communities.

Attention to the questions that students have about their world conflicts with the traditional pattern of schooling in America. The predominant nature or “grammar” (Tyack & Tobin, 1994) of schools presents a major obstacle to students asking, exploring, and responding to questions in their local environment as a core pedagogy. Gruenewald (2003b) notes that:

… the “grammar” of school reform lacks a vocabulary for place. Just as this grammar distracts our attention from democracy as a valued educational goal, it distracts us from places and their power to shape experiential, cultural, ideological, political and ecological orientations toward being in the world.

(p. 642)

When students undertake local investigations, the pattern is not, “Do you know x, y, or z? Yes or no?”—with so much attention being paid to “no.” The pattern is, “What is this about? What does it mean to you? Where can we go to understand these things better?”

These contrasting patterns are accentuated by the gross inequalities that permeate our society and are mirrored in the way American students access and experience education. In general, children in predominantly white, wealthier communities experience a higher quality of education and opportunity than poor children of color (Delpit, 2012). Yet socioeconomic factors and racial divides are not always the determining factors. Some schools with meager resources find ways to deliver a rigorous, innovative learning experience for their students, and affluent communities can fail to challenge their students in many significant ways. Furthermore, federal edicts carry contradictory expectations and affect schools differently. This contrast in teachers’ realities, choices, and working conditions is part of a highly complex landscape in which to work.

It is the teacher’s creative capacity to work effectively amidst these many contradictions that adds to our understanding of teachers as agents of change. Acting with what Henderson and Kesson (2004) call “curriculum wisdom,” teachers “must stick our necks out in a high-minded, determined and consistent way” (p. 2). This view of a teacher’s agency invites a:

… new understanding of the relationship between democracy and schooling, and learning and social change…. [E]ducators need a new vocabulary for not only defining schools as democratic public spheres, students as informed and critically engaged citizens, but also teachers as public intellectuals.

(Giroux, 2013, p. 165)

Teachers who undertake the creative task of designing local investigations constantly seek new ways to make learning happen, better engage their students, and help their students perform better. This becomes the new vocabulary that Gruenewald and Giroux call for, built with genuine connections, stronger relationships, and high performance. As teachers pursue the sweetness of this deeper work, it changes business as usual for themselves, their students, and the work that they do together.

Teacher Portrait #1: Kate Toland: High School

DOI: 10.4324/9781315795195-2

“The kids in my class have brand-new vertebrae!”

The first year Kate became involved in an ethnographic community inquiry, her students researched quality-of-life indicators around the world and then looked at their community. There was a wide span of topics students considered, such as access to restaurants, traffic, student drug use versus adult perceptions of student drug use, impacts of the war in Iraq, recreational opportunities for teens, and the quality of the sports teams.

As a high school social studies teacher, Kate ran three years of community research with her ninth-graders. In the third year, Kate undertook making a video with 58 ninth-graders. She worked with an ethnographer from the Vermont Folklife Center who suggested they explore diversity from a historical perspective. Teaching in a school where 18 percent of the students have recently come from another country and many other students are descendants of previous waves of Italian and French-Canadian immigrants, Kate set out to explore this diversity in a way that she hoped would build empathy and understanding. As the project unfolded, she found that students could see their own attitudes within a historical context. One of her students commented: “Wow, my prejudice is just like how they felt about the French-Canadians 100 years ago.” As students conducted interviews and struggled to create a video that reflected everyone’s views, they learned to listen to each other in new ways. They discovered things they felt proud of. “The kids in my class have brand-new vertebrae!” exclaimed Kate.

The film the students made was titled “Welcoming the World: Our City—Past and Present,” and, as one student described it, the film told the “interesting and untold stories of our city.” Talking with a group of students about whether to include a blatant expression of racism in the video, one said: “If you don’t address these issues, Ms. Toland, [students] will leave your class with the same attitudes they came in with.” At the first showing, a grandmother shared her realization that newcomers had it hard: “[The film] made me realize that I could have done a better job reaching out.”

In imagining the “perfect” place-based moment, Kate replies: “I think that we would be talking about the elephant in the room… tackling the tough issues that the community hasn’t been able to solve, that the adults haven’t been able to solve by themselves. It introduces them to some of the conundrums of humanity.”

Kate believes that authentic inquiry helps students learn to understand and deal with the world: “I think schools try to package everything like it’s already done. Here is the world, this is economics, this is business, everything is in a box. But there’s no easy answer. And there’s not an easy answer in life… working through real problems introduces that in a nice way and teaches them their voice matters.”

1 What is Place-based Curriculum Design?

DOI: 10.4324/9781315795195-3

A teacher’s craft is highly fluid and involves the abilities to make many decisions at once; creatively connect learners, ideas, and worthwhile outcomes; and model inquisitive, rigorous, and original thinking. The view of a teacher as an artist, while not a new analogy, affirms the creative capacity needed to make learning happen each day for 25, 35, or 145 other human beings under her watch.

The design of local investigations invites a wide span of practice and is associated with a more self-directed, inquiry-based, experiential pedagogy. The ability to facilitate investigations implies a skilled ability to structure learning around questions and to claim time for students to explore, experiment, and interpret. In inquiry-based learning, the teacher is a coach, problem-poser, and facilitator. If a teacher says, “My students do a lot of inquiry,” she may mean that she pays a lot of attention to their questions within a structured curriculum, or she may mean that her students are designing and conducting far-reaching, self-directed investigations in the community. Inquiry—in educational parlance—is both an adjective and a noun.

In designing place-based curriculum, there is a particular complexity to orchestrating an authentic engagement with the people, places, and things outside of the classroom, while addressing curriculum standards and being responsive to the needs of each student. This book explores four aspects of teaching and learning that present themselves in authentic local investigations: the learners’ experience, mastery of subject, relationship to place, and personal agency. Posed as questions, these elements reveal the breadth of complexity the teacher encounters in order to design local learning:

• How can I better relate school to my students’ life experience?
• How can I help students better understand how this big idea works in the real world?
• How can I help students better understand this place?
• • How can I help students better understand themselves and their possible futures?

Teachers create their own answers to these questions. The constructed pedagogical “answer” determines how she makes the many decisions involved in teaching. This is a creative journey for the teacher that involves new ideas, reading, and conversations with colleagues as well as the ongoing integration of past and present experience, personal values, and professional training. A teacher’s vision, what Wells (2001) defines as “a point of reference in decision making and problem solving” (p. 16), develops from a mix of theory and practice.

However the process starts, it plays into and works through the teacher’s belief about what is possible. This changes in relation to her philosophy, her perceived and real agency in the classroom, and her view of the young people she is teaching, their ways of learning, and who they might become. The teacher comes to understand these dimensions of her practice as she finds new ways to organize learning around more authentic tasks. She learns to manage, articulate, negotiate, and enact new pathways of learning. All these things merge to become the curriculum that actually gets delivered each day. When a teacher succeeds in merging all these elements into a unified approach that guides the learning and creates room for students’ questions and self-direction, it can become a highly fluid undertaking.

A teacher might use a primary document from the local historical society or invite a guest speaker to class and say: “Wow, my kids were really engaged. I want to do that more!” She may observe students out in a park looking at weeds on a sidewalk and feel a new energy in her classroom when she talks about how plants grow. Or she may find herself entwined in a full-blown ethnographic study as her students gather stories from elders, create digital archives for the neighborhood, and host community events to share the information. Teachers find ways to create opportunities for content acquisition, such as better writing skills and knowledge of local history, as well as a vision of a personal future, job opportunities, and service.

As they mix together these curricular goals, they continually adapt to meet the needs of individual students. Working with the elements of curricular intentions, rather than a set definition of place-based education, underlines the creative, fluid nature of the process. “A transformative curriculum… is one that allows for, encourages, and develops [a] natural capacity for complex organization; and through the process of transformation the curriculum continually regenerates itself and those involved with it,” according to Doll (1993, p. 87).

“You're not always sure what's going to happen next, but that's what I love.”

Teachers who manage the complexity of these relationships have a commitment to honor and learn with their students, and a level of comfort with the unexpected event. As a teacher forms a vision of what engaged learning might look like, she might gain insight from Myles Horton (1990) who believed that teaching with a vision was a “two-eyed” practice:

I like to think I have two-eyes that I don’t have to use the same way…. I try to see with one eye where… people are…. If I can get hold of that, this is where I start. So I look at them with my other eye and say to myself, how do I start moving them from where they perceive themselves to be, to where I know they can be.

(pp. 131–132)

Or she may come to see the challenge in the way that Kate Toland (see “Teacher Portrait #1”) reflects:

There are things that I can predict that the students will be able to do. But there is a deeper thing that happens— that’s the piece that’s so powerful. So we create the conditions for X, Y, Z; you s...