Place-based education is an interdisciplinary approach to education that immerses students in the history, culture, landscapes, and experiences of their own communities. The geographic concept of place, at the heart of place-based education, has three aspects representing the objective and subjective – location, locale, sense of place.[1]

Location

All places have an absolute location, a fixed coordinate on the surface of the planet. Locations are usually communicated using latitude and longitude. Students can easily determine the absolute location, or latitude and longitude, of their dwelling, school, or community using global position system (GPS) receivers, often included in modern cell phones. Location is objective and rarely contested. People with different values or different experiences can hardly disagree about the latitude/longitude reference for a town, or its dot on a road map. But the next two aspects, locale and sense of place, are shifting sands of meaning.

Locale

The second aspect of place, locale, is the actual setting in which people carry on their lives. Settings consist of objects – roads, buildings, trees, walls, furniture, doors, or pictures on the wall. When people describe their dwelling or the community, they usually list the most prominent characteristics, or the locale. But people experience buildings and communities differently. For example, if next door neighbors are asked to describe the locale of their community by listing the five most prominent landmarks, the lists will likely be different. People see the landmarks of their community every day, but ascribe very different levels of importance to the objects because of their experiences.

Sense of Place

The third aspect of place is a sense of place, a phrase geographers use to describe a person’s subjective and emotional attachment to a location and locale.  Investigating Family, Food, and Housing Themes in Social Studies explores a place called home. Home might be a happy safe place for some or associated with violence, abuse, or a struggle for survival for others. Sense of place does not only originate in the minds of individuals. Concepts of place or home are influenced by the wider culture.  Place is a social construct, an idea appearing natural and obvious to the group of people who agree it is true, but it may not represent reality when examined closely.

Subjective or Objective?

Perceptions of communities, as well as houses, food, and family, are socially constructed. For example, small towns are often described as ideal locations for homes and families and common terms and phrases used to describe them are a part of a wider, American social construct of an ideal community called “small town America.” Phrases like “people are friendly” and “people know and help their neighbors” are commonly used to describe this utopian place.

“Small town values” has become a common and controversial phrase in modern political commentary. This phrase can have positive connotations or suggest negative qualities such as close-mindedness.  When “small town America” is held up as an ideal, the unspoken implication is big city America is a negative opposite that should be avoided. These constructs are often unquestioned and accepted as reality, but upon closer examination, the claims may be overly positive, stereotypical, and ignore harsh realities. Everyone in a small town is not friendly and helpful; city-dwellers are not all unfriendly.

The  concept of place often encompasses perceptions of power that should be examined. The architecture, maintenance, and location of residential neighborhoods convey messages of power or lack of power. The visibility of grand historical homes as tourist sites and the absence or invisibility of the historical homes of average people creates a skewed view of life in the past.

Consider the roles of worker households whose labor enabled construction, the craftspeople who built the homes, and the servants who maintained these estates, as well as the power the elite had over these average people. Great houses are often named for the man who built them. Explore the contributions of women –  the wives, mothers, daughters, and servants – who lived in the house and oversaw, cleaned, and maintained these great houses. Search for historical homes and neighborhoods of working people, servants, and slaves.

Placed-based education asks students to explore their community, the locations in it, and the meanings attached to those locations by different groups of people so that students develop an awareness and appreciation for the experiences of their neighbors.

[i] Tim Creswell, Place: A Short Introduction (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 7.

For more about place-based education in the social studies classroom:
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About the header image: Class photo of African American 6th graders at a segregated school in Muskogee, Oklahoma, 1917. Photo by Lewis Hine.
Courtesy of Library of Congress.