Across the United States, communities are thinking differently about how to transform their schools and neighborhoods. There is tremendous excitement about strategies that weave together resources in a clearly defined "place" to collectively improve outcomes for children, youth, families, and communities. The paper explores the…

Student participation in real-world problems promotes "a sense of their own agency andcollective capacity to alter their neighbourhoods or communities for the better" (Smith, 2007).This paper describes student engagement in a two-week summer workshop conducted in June2016, where they used geospatial technologies and community mapping to…

This interpretive study identifies challenges of working with Bedouin and Jewish Israeli youth in two multicultural projects: education for sustainability and place-conscious education. It also describes the ways the adult project leaders addressed these challenges and their views on the effectiveness of their decisions. Participants comprised 16…

In this article, I argue for the need to improve teacher preparation (TP) courses for elementary education student teachers to teach English-language arts (ELA). In particular, these TP programs need to support student teachers in delivering culturally responsive pedagogy within rural classrooms. Twenty-three student teachers participated in this…

The author's experience of the day-to-day issues faced as an educator in an Aboriginal school are recounted, along with perspectives gained as part of a research project. The proposition is argued that an Education for Sustainability approach, where learning is structured around a negotiated environmental issue within local community, represents a…

The goal of this study was to investigate the degree to which school-based and nonformal education programs that focus on air quality (AQ) achieved measurable AQ improvements, and whether specific instructional methods were associated with those improvements. We completed a standardized telephone interview with representatives of 54 AQ education…

Place plays an indelible role in the way people perceive and come to understand the world around them. Place influences their interactions by shaping the genres, texts, and languages they use as writers and readers. Therefore, writing that's tied to place and community encourages students to seriously consider the effects of these interactions,…

Grounded in theory and best-practices research, this practical text provides elementary and middle school teachers with 40 place-based activities that will help them to make science learning relevant to their students. This text provides teachers with both a rationale and a set of strategies and activities for teaching science in a local context…

Place-based writing affords students an opportunity to write meaningfully about themselves, grounded in a place that they know. Place-based writing is versatile and can be additive--taking just a week or two within a semester of different projects--or transformative, if positioned as the theme for an entire course. If students can learn to write…

In the early 1800s, the U.S. President Thomas Jefferson assembled a team of explorers led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to forge a waterway connecting the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean. How has this environment changed in 200 years and how do elementary students make sense of those changes? This study looks at the impact of…

As a result of shifting marine environmental conditions caused by global climate change and localized water pollution, marine organisms are becoming increasingly exposed to changing water quality conditions. For example, they are exposed to more extreme salinity fluctuations as a result of heavier rainfall, melting polar caps, or extreme droughts.…

This study explores how university students (i.e., undergraduate and graduate students) participating in a place-based outreach program practiced teaching strategies on four field trips. The outreach program, Learning in Place-Based Environments (LPBE), provided opportunities for the university students to teach fifth grade students about place,…

With growing disconnection from the natural world, educators who work in the outdoors need to philosophically rethink their "modus operandi". Past efforts by adventure and outdoor educators to promote connection with nature have often centred upon risk-centric approaches incorporating adventure-fuelled and high-adrenalin activities. This…

Learning about climate change is tangible when it addresses impacts that can be observed close to home. In this program, sixty-four diverse middle and high school students produced videos about locally relevant climate change topics. Graduate and undergraduate students provided mentorship. The program engaged students in research and learning…

This dissertation proposes a place-based theoretical and methodological framework, informed by concepts of ecology, multimodality, and activity systems. I apply this framework of ecoliteracy as it is defined within the interdisciplinary contexts of rhetoric and composition, linguistics, and Chicana/o studies. Ecoliteracy refers to individuals'…