Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Good examples of place-based learning programs
   Encouragements to get started in place-based education

The Rural School and Community Trust has published profiles of five place-based learning programs.

The curriculum I’ve been working on this year has kept me farther than I want to be from place-based approaches, but last week’s Montana Indian Education Association Conference restored me to my better self. I’ve been thinking quite a lot about the particular place I am teaching, and how far away from much of it young people truly are. In a digital age, it gets harder and harder to get here, which is the only place we have much hope of being real.

There is a two-mile stretch of road along a canal that I used to walk with a friend who has been gone from here for years. I no longer walk there and I can’t pass by without a dual feeling of remembered good times and sorrow that they are past, never to return. Places are places in part because they are haunted.

They are haunted by other selves. We don’t become or stay human by ourselves. Place is mostly mind, a level of narrative perception somewhere between molecules and stars. When todays Salish gaze at the uninhabited mountains, they are gazing into the past, and so the wilderness that enchants with its beauty in the same instant saddens by evoking an awareness of loss. This is the nearest I can come to a definition of “sense of place.” It seems to me that it resonates from loss, intensifying our need for joy. It is part memory, part longing.

We know that we cannot stay more than we know where we really are. We are, as Walker Percy put it, “lost in the cosmos.” A sense of place grows out of a longing for family, for a place in the vastness of time and space at a scale and in a key where we might be understood and loved.

A few weeks after my grandson came into my study, I was there again reading a work of popular physics, something about the illusoriness of time. I went to my window and looked out at the winter night into the thick swirl of snowflakes. In the near distance I saw two cars moving slowly, as it seemed to me, through whatever night they encountered. Matter was, I had been told, vastly different than it seemed. The empty spaces between protons and electrons were a million billion times bigger than the particles themselves. The apparent solidity of things was an illusion created in part by the poor resolution of my eyes but more by the force fields within which the particles existed. Nobody knows what such force fields really are. The electrons and protons themselves were made of smaller particles which emerged from waves of something more original than energy flooding into the universe and pulsing throughout being.

My grandson appeared beside me tugging at my pant leg and looking up, his two-year-old eyes pure with pleading. “I want to see.” So I lifted him to the window where he could gaze at the swirl of flakes and the mystery of light.

A sense of place is a sense of orientation. It is the beginning and end of knowing.

The books to read are Greg Smith’s new Place-Based Education in the Global Age, David Sobel’s Place-Based Education: Connecting Classrooms & Communities, and maybe my own The Power of Community-Centered Education: Teaching as a Craft of Place.