Collaborative programs are essential to fully engage and educate all who interact with the environment. Existing place-based programs targeting the care of Hawai'i's land and oceans rarely simultaneously engage the tourism industry and local communities. To address this gap, researchers from the Hawai'i Institute of Marine Biology developed a…

This book showcases the transformative impact of Aboriginal community-based educators teaching local histories and cultures to preservice teachers. It details the 'Learning from Country in the City' teaching and research project, which follows preservice teachers who participated in immersive 'Learning from Country' experiences in undergraduate…

Too often, our reading lists center one-size-fits-all authors and experiences that don't make space for the wide array of cultures and histories that enliven our classrooms. Too often, our schools operate as if on an island, largely unaware of what is happening next door. Community engaged literacies, meaning-making opportunities connecting local…

Natural disasters, like hurricanes, are great forces that enter and alter people's lives as well as their perceptions of reality. This article offers a model for community education events based on history, culture, and lore using the centennial of the Great October Storm of 1893 in Louisiana as a case study.

Literature suggests that institutional efforts to cultivate civic engagement may have developmental importance on an institution's mission, values, and culture. This study seeks to detail how anchor and place-based justice network institutions digitally engage with their communities through a website content analysis and using Ostrander's civic…

Place-based Education (PBE) is the process of adapting students' educational experiences to the places and characteristics of their communities to make learning more "practical, relevant, and meaningful", and to help them become creators, not just consumers of knowledge (Ledward, 2013; Fukuda, Ah Sam, and Wong, 2010). PBE curriculum is…

STEAM has gained traction across informal and formal educational settings, but the connections between STEAM disciplines are not always obvious to youth. We argue that an explicit focus on how art and STEM overlap in the world, and how these overlaps connect personally to learner's interests and concerns, is a way to support the development of…

This Projects With Promise case study offers insights for addressing tensions between universities and communities in building partnerships and collectively rethinking "the field" of community engagement. We explore moving beyond a solely place-based understanding of "the field" into an ethos based on human interactions and…

Facilitating the exploration of adolescents' questions regarding nature is vital. Research suggests that their questions are important as they can reveal their interests in particular subjects and further guide their learning process. We designed a quasi-experimental study for 68 adolescents in an outdoor and indoor setting to assess the efficacy…

This article details a unit of study bringing together shared reading, place-based pedagogies, and climate-centered texts to engage students in youth participatory community action (YPAR). The authors envision an English classroom where youth read, write, and argue for change as activists as they encounter climate justice literature through YPAR…

Pre-service formal educator training is well-established in both practice and research, with future teachers participating in rigorous pedagogical and practical training through partnerships with local school districts. However, the training for pre-service non-formal educators is less researched and available. Environmental education literature…

Given the ongoing socio-ecological crises, higher education institutions need curricular interventions to support students in developing the knowledge, skills, and perspectives needed to create a sustainable future. Campus farms are increasingly becoming sites for sustainability and environmental education toward this end. This paper describes the…

This research was originally presented as a chapter in the doctoral dissertation "On Becoming a People's College: An Appreciative Inquiry." Appreciative Inquiry (Ai) is a participatory approach to organizational change focused on an affirmative topic choice. The topic choice of the dissertation was equity, democracy, and justice at the…

Despite the scientific consensus, climate change continues to be socially and politically controversial. Consequently, teachers may worry about accusations of political indoctrination if they teach climate change in their classrooms. Research shows that many teachers are using the 'teaching the controversy' approach to teach climate change,…

Quality education is an often-heard term that has no single meaning. In this paper, we use the metaphor of mat weaving to structure an exploration of various elements that inform quality education. To form the mat, a warp of literature-derived threads is woven with the weft of practitioners' ideas of quality education. These local perspectives…