Navigating Place-Based Learning

This book explores how educators can realize the potential of critical place-based pedagogy. The authors’ model leverages the power of technology through strategies such as mobile mapping so that students can read the world and share spatial narratives. The same complexity that makes spaces outside the classroom ideal for authentic, purposeful learning creates challenges for educators who must minimize students taking wrong turns or reaching dead ends. Instructional design process is key and the authors offer exemplars of this from multiple disciplines. Whether students are exploring a local community or a natural environment, place-based inquires must include recognition of privilege and the social dynamics that reinforce inequalities. Concluding with a discussion of the changing social context, the authors highlight how contemporary events add a sense of urgency to the call for a critical place-based pedagogy—one that is more inclusive for all students.   

“Now more than ever, place matters—in health, natural hazards, agriculture, transportation, supply chain management, and in every other field in which the ‘where’ question is being asked. It is fitting, therefore, that place, community, and the ‘whys of where’ be supported, promoted, and nurtured in a student’s education from primary to university level and beyond. Elizabeth Langran and Janine DeWitt’s new book Navigating Place-Based Learning: Mapping for a Better World lays the theoretical foundation for why place-based instruction matters. Beyond the foundation, though, these two experts describe data, tools, and instructional strategies for infusing rich, exciting, and tech-enabled instructional elements across several disciplines, including geography, biology, environmental studies, sociology, history, technology, and many others. These tools include those that can be used in the field, in the classroom, and in online courses that fully embrace cloud-based technologies and data, such as web based GIS (realized in such platforms as ArcGIS Online and field tools such as Survey123 and Mapillary) and multimedia tools such as story maps and other visualizations. The book focuses on demonstrating how to teach using the inquiry model of asking a question, gathering and analyzing data, making decisions and recommendations, and—the element that is often left out of other books—acting on that new-found knowledge to make a positive difference in communities. The book is more than simply a sum of its elements of theory, practical advice, and examples: threaded wonderfully and thoughtfully throughout the book is the authors’ vision of what place-based education can truly be, the impact it can make on students and instructors, and what society can be as a result.”
—Joseph Kerski, Education Manager and Geographer, Esri, USA

Elizabeth Langran is Professor of Education at Marymount University, USA, and President of the Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education (SITE). She has taught secondary and post-secondary students in the US, Morocco, and Switzerland and holds a doctorate in Instructional Technology from the University of Virginia.

Janine DeWitt is Professor of Sociology at Marymount University, USA. She teaches sociology courses that include place-based and experiential learning, and she co-developed a globally-networked course where she became intrigued by the process of intercultural team-teaching.