Sunday, March 9, 2014

PLACE-BASED EDUCATION AS PART OF GLOBAL ENGAGEMENT




To everyone who is engaged in developing global citizenship:

This time the focus is on local awareness and pedagogy of place because …
- the local, the national and the global aspects of citizenship complement each other;
- because first hand local experiences supplement all the second-hand experiences of students;
- because love of nature and appreciation of sustainability is closely connected to local experience.

Place-based Education is a movement in education that is growing and expanding:
“Place-based education promotes learning that is rooted in what is local—the unique history, environment, culture, economy, literature, and art of a particular place – that is, in students’ own place or immediate schoolyard, neighborhood, town or community. According to this pedagogy, grade school students often lose what place-based educators call their sense of placethrough focusing too quickly or exclusively on national or global issues. Place-based education is often hands-on, project-based, and always related to something in the real world.” Quote from (Wikipedia)

Introduction to Place-based Education (20 pages):
1. Place-based Learning
2. Civic Engagement and Place-based Learning
3. Getting started: launching a Place-based Learning & Civic Engagement Program in your Community (pdf)

Lecture by David Sobel on how Place-based education connects students to resources and learning in their local communities and landscapes. “Authentic environmental and social commitment emerges out of firsthand experiences with real places on a small, manageable scale over time” (video, 47 m.)


Examples of Place-based Education in practice:

Connect with nature through community-serving projects:
Student projects at Horace Mann Magnet Middle School, in Little Rock, Arkansas (video, 10 min.) (article on webpage)


Development of Ecoliteracy:
This model of education "takes the cultivation of emotional and social intelligence as its foundation and expands this foundation to integrate ecological intelligence. But rather than conceive of these as three separate types of intelligences, we recognize emotional, social, and ecological intelligence as essential dimensions of our universal human intelligence that simply expand outward in their focus: from self, to others, to all living systems. We also conceive of these intelligences in a dynamic relationship with each other: Cultivate one, and you help cultivate the others." (webpage) 

Resources from Center for Ecoliteracy: 
https://www.ecoliteracy.org/resources


Five vital practices that integrate emotional, social & ecological intelligence:
1. Developing Empathy for All Forms of Life 
2. Embracing Sustainability as a Community Practice 
3. Making the Invisible Visible 
4. Anticipating Unintended Consequences 
5. Understanding How Nature Sustains Life  (webpage)

The school garden movement:
- “The school in every garden”. A garden in every school....What a great idea.” (webpage)
-“Rethinking School Lunch. Cooking with California Food” (Excellent cook book & English learning text on dishes, flavor profiles, and fall, winter, spring & summer recipes)https://www.ecoliteracy.org/download/rethinking-school-lunch-guide
- ”What would happen if we declared that the garden was at the center of the school's life? (webpage)- "Why do you want to work here?" "Because your school looks like a prison yard, and I'd like to change that,"  (So much magic around the garden, webpage)

Outdoor schools: A comparative perspective is in use in this article in Danish on "Danish Outdoor School in an International perspective": "Dansk udeskole i et internationalt perspektiv"
The focus is on relations to nature, to each other and to yourself especially in Norwegian "uteskole", Swedish   "utenomhuspædagogik" and Danish "udeskole" compared to broader international trends.
(webpage) (translate in Google Translate)


Conclusion: "The concrete, the local, and the individual has a global dimension. This perception can help us to understand the link between our own nearby environment and worldwide developments, and, in doing so, to better comprehend globality. (Quote from page 44 in "Becoming a Global Citizen. Proceedings of The international Conference on Competencies of Global Citizens", (97 pages, pdf)


This text is "Teach GLOBAL CITIZENSHIP" network newsletter no. 10
__________________________________________________________________
To read any of the previous newsletters simply visit the blog http://teachglobalcitizenship.blogspot.dk/

Yours
Egon Hedegaard,
Educational consultant, independent instructor and Developer of Education
Email: eghedegaard@gmail.com
______________________________________________________________________
Everyone is welcome to receive these newsletters, just send me email addresses. Please, network by sending me questions, inspiring links and texts to use in future newsletters.



No comments:

Post a Comment