Week 3 Blog Posts

January 20/21, 2020

For assignment one, I chose Place-Based education as my critical summary topic. I have found an article called Place-Based Education: Improving Learning While Connecting Students to Community and Environment wrote by Corissa Pasiechnyk. This article has provided me with lots of information on what Place-Based education is, along with the benefits and challenges of this educational approach. This article also provides its readers with different opinions from many great scholars, including, Dewey, Grunewald, and Sobel.

According to the article “Place-Based education has the capacity to improve student learning and engagement while simultaneously linking students to their communities and natural environments” (Pasiechnyk, pg. 1, 2018). Place-Based education, “Is emerging as a progressive response to the standardized, decontextualized curricula that have historically and contemporarily characterized our education system (pg. i). The author suggests that there is a need for change within the decontextualized curriculum and place-based education may be what is needed for students to become more engaged and intrigued by the content in the curriculum. The purpose of Place-Based education is to allow the students to be more interactive while engaging with the course content and the history of their surrounding community, “It boosts student achievement and improves environmental, social, and economic vitality” (Pasiechnyk, pg. 10, 2018).

For the next steps in my critical summary, I want to find two more scholarly articles that agree and disagree with my main article. I plan to mention in my critical summary all the beliefs on Place-Based education from multiple scholars if they agree or disagree with the approach. I also want to find out how Place-Based education is implemented in schools that are in rural communities and those that are in more urban settings.