Place-based education is pedagogy rooted in local landscapes, community experts, and embodied communication. This essay explores the authors' initial findings from a two-year pilot project that connects students from the University of New Mexico and students from Colorado College in a multisite field experience connected to the Rio Grande Watershed in New Mexico. They offer insights about how this type of pedagogical approach challenges Western frameworks of communication studies by engaging an interdisciplinary approach that bridges critical communication theory and place-based models of education that honor specific embodied knowledge from those directly and deeply connected to traditional, multigenerational educational models embedded in the lands and waters in Northern New Mexico and Southern Colorado. To do this, the authors: (1) work with community partners to build a place-based curriculum; (2) collaboratively redefine what justice for the environment looks like; (3) build an evaluation model that can inform our pedagogical practice; and (4) develop online resources accessible to those invested in place-based models for ecocultural environmental justice.