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Place-based Education (PBE):

  • Immerses students in local heritage, cultures, landscapes, opportunities and experiences;
  • Uses these as a foundation for the study of language arts, mathematics, social studies, science and other subjects across the curriculum; and
  • Emphasizes learning through participation in service projects for the local school and/or community.

Stories From the Field:
Place-based education in action

Student with Chicken Chickens in the Classroom

An educator was teaching first graders a lesson about chickens when something unexpected—and extraordinary—happened: a little chicken leapt across a cultural divide.

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Research and Evaluation:
Making the case for place-based education

The Benefits of Place-based Education cover image Highlighted Reports
  • Benefits of Place-based Education
  • Closing the Achivement Gap
  • Quantifying a Relationship Between Place-Based Learning and Environmental Quality
  • Benefits of Nature for Children's Health, Fact Sheet #1

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The Network:
Place-based education in your community and around the world

Shelburne Farms Shelburne Farms

Shelburne Farms is an environmental education center, 1,400-acre working farm, and National Historic Landmark. Our mission is to cultivate a conservation ethic by teaching and demonstrating the stewardship of natural and agricultural resources.

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Calendar

Community Works' Institute on Service-Learning

Monday-Friday, July 20–24, 2009; 8:30 am–4:30 pm
The Institute provides K–16 teachers, community educators, and administrators with training, models, strategies, and resources for developing service learning and sustainability as an integrated feature of curriculum with clear links to standards.

Workshops & Institutes Education for Sustainability (EFS) Institute

Wednesday & Thursday, August 5 & 6, 2009; 8:30 am–4:30 pm
The Institute provides K–16 teachers, community educators, and administrators with training, models, strategies, and resources for developing service learning and sustainability as an integrated feature of curriculum with clear links to standards.

Project Seasons

Summer Workshop Monday–Friday, July 13–17, 2009; 9:00 am–4:00 pm
Discover exciting, interdisciplinary, and hands-on ways to enrich your science curriculum with easy-to-use activities on environmental and agricultural topics. This workshop is designed to increase science literacy and cultivate connections by tracing the food we eat and the clothes we wear back to the farm.

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Vignette

Outdoorsmen Tell Tales of the Woods

Inspired by the Northern Forest Center's Ways of the Woods traveling exhibit, students in the extracurricular Team Quest program from L.P. Quinn School in Tupper Lake, New York, got excited to explore their own community. The students, with their teachers and an educator from the Adirondack Museum, learned how to use a digital video camera, conduct interviews and edit the material. On a beautiful day in June, Jim and Butch, Adirondack outdoorsmen with decades of experience on hunting, fishing and building boats, paddled to a local park to spend the morning with the students, answering questions about their experiences, and how equipment and the landscape have changed over the years. The students and their adult mentors edited the document into a video for public use.

L.P Quinn
Tupper Lake, New York


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