Place-Based Curriculum

Place-based curriculum can be viewed as a holistic approach to education, conservation, and community development that uses the local community as an integrating context for learning. Place-based curriculum seeks to foster a partnership between schools and communities. Historically, it has focused on environmental, social, and economic change, using a project-focused approach tailored by local people to local realities. It has been referred to as community-oriented schooling, ecological education, and bioregional education. The current notion is based on the concept that people should know and understand the historical, sociological, ecological, and political traditions of the places they inhabit. In the current atmosphere of schooling, place-based education is seen as a primarily rural concept. Ironically, the most successful and oldest forms of place-based curriculum are urban. This entry is a brief narrative of place-based curricula, a discussion of its philosophical underpinnings, and examples of place-based curriculum and their place within the current educational and social policies.

The 1959 Conant report was extremely influential in restructuring the small high school, calling for consolidation of small schools and teaching of subject-based lessons (to compete in science and math). James Conant advocated consolidation and graduating classes of 100 or more to have diversified curricula, effectively ending integrated subjects (crucial to placed-based education) and focus on disciplines. In the 1960s, place-based curriculum was crucial to the foundation of Head Start in Mt. Beulah, Mississippi. Alongside this formal education, informal groups used place to drive social change. Freedom Schools in the South, civil rights workers and their organizations, and urban workers redefined the idea of place-based curriculum.

In New York City, urban plight and poverty led the city to allow schools to be run by local school boards (Brownsville), focus on ethnic populations, and allow alternative school within school buildings. Examples, such as Central Park East (founded by Deborah Meier), reinvigorated place-based curriculum in schools. In Berkeley, Chicano Studies emerged as a high school major; and the Black Panthers began running community schools in Oakland. In Texas and Louisiana, ethnic groups (Vietnamese and Mexican) founded language schools. In 1963, Coral Way Elementary (Miami-Dade, Florida, County Public Schools) became the first bilingual school (educating children in the day and parents at night). The North Dakota Study [Page 655]Group (founded by Vito Perone) became a hub for place-based curricula and evaluation of place-based schools. However, in the 1970s, schooling became less focused on place and more on a de facto national curriculum. During this time, rural depopulation, the farm crisis (1980s), and the changing rural landscape led many schools to turn to place-based education. Consolidation and Hispanic migration led rural schools to rethink ideas of place and identity. Currently, place-based education has reemerged in urban areas through charter and neighborhood schools and in rural areas (especially in Appalachia and the Great Plains) of extreme poverty.

Currently, reformers and researchers make the case that rural universities should specialize in rural teacher preparation because preparing lessons anchored in community circumstances and dilemmas is sophisticated pedagogical work. Concurrently, urban schools seek total control of local or neighborhood schools and integration of local culture in the curriculum. Place-based education has been enlivened by the current push for environmental or green education. Local sustain-ability has become the driving force of local curricula based on local needs. For example, the state of Iowa has become involved in curricula that seek to improve water pollution from local farms. In West Virginia and rural Pennsylvania, there are current efforts to increase local studies of small communities, especially coke, steel, and coal industries. In California, an effort is underway to record and discover local languages (many of which are indigenous and disappearing) through school programs involved with local action groups.

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