Place-Based Education: Do I Have to Spell it Out for You?
Smith and Sobel’s chapters on placed-based and community-based education provide an adequate foundation of information for what I believe every school should have regardless of school type; community ties. It’s often the case, especially in the those of traditional or “typical” public schools, that communities are underutilized as a resource for student growth and, consequently, under-appreciated by the students who grow up in an absence of community appreciation in their schools. Whether this is because communities are limited with what they can do because of bureaucratic red tape or because schools simply haven’t reached out to any sectors (i.e. food, entrepreneurship, local artists, etc.) of the community, I feel as though schools should be required to engage in the community as a whole in order to promote student appreciation for where they live and, as Smith and Sobel put it, “reintegrate children into their worlds.”
It wasn’t until I joined the Student U program as a student, that I began to understand the wide scope of learning and education, as the program inserted us within the Durham community to act as forces for good through programs such as Meals on Wheels and a variety of community-based internships/apprenticeships in various local businesses. Through these experiences I was able to learn a trade (the creation of art as an occupation) and gain insight on the history and diversity of both my community and its ever-changing inhabitants. Through these programs I was able to engage with local elders and gain insight on their trade as well as their history with the town, engaging with those who are often forgotten in this age of individuality and “leaving well enough alone” both in schools and in everyday life. These experiences with Student U fell in line with Smith and Sobel’s two critical aspects of place-based ed: applicability to any or all subjects and “the role played by community members in the delivery of education to the young.” These experiences, however, contrasted starkly with the experiences of public school as, even though public schools often represent (racially) the communities in which they live in, they fail to work in sync with these communities to promote positive community outlooks and fail to create a mutual support system that would benefit both students and community members. This, thusly, facilitates an indifference or even animosity towards the community you live in as nothing has been done on the part of teachers to express the beauty or the best parts of the communities that students live in.
This sentiment of structurally-sponsored community disinterest is addressed in Smith and Sobel’s third chapter in the section that discusses “giving young people a reason to invest themselves in learning”, harkening back to growing student disinterest in communities as an offhand result of NCLB (i.e. the new time dedication needed to prep students for testing taking away from any potential academic investment in the community). While combating NCLB at this point would be extremely difficult, Smith and Sobel resort to spelling out all the tangible good that place-based education provides, that standardization and the other implications of NCLB don’t provide; the growth of social and human capital, establishing the inspiration to “steward and preserve” communities, develop a capacity for problem-solving skills at the local level and educating for a “common good.”
