Gregory Sharrow, Director of Education and Folklorist for the Vermont Folklife Center, has been collecting stories all of his life. As a child, Sharrow took long drives with his family through familiar Midwestern landscapes, marveling at how each place they passed evoked a story. As an adult, Sharrow took his interest in place-driven stories and developed it into a Place-Based Education curriculum for K-12 teachers (though the curriculum’s methods and lessons are appropriate to college instruction as well). This curriculum is founded on a simple but too-often ignored principle: take students into the places that they inhabit, and use these places to teach important lessons in every subject. Sharrow’s own focus is history and cultural studies: he brings students into intimate knowledge of place in order to present them with lessons both “vertical” (historical) and “horizontal” (cultural).
Sharrow’s assignments are intriguing. With a group of elementary school students, Sharrow collected old town maps that included forgotten roads, and that named the former inhabitants of every house. Students used these maps in a variety of ways—for instance, to learn more about the homes they now occupied. They also walked abandoned roads, spotting patches where lilac and rhubarb were growing, evidence of gardens long forgotten. Students engaged in these real-life experiences will inevitably come to question why a particular road or farm might have been abandoned. This question would lead to research, which would eventually yield a story. Through these stories, students can create valuable connections between their academic and civic lives.
The means by which Sharrow’s students demonstrate their Place-Based Learning is digital media—both audio and video. Sharrow shared with us audiotapes from a variety of assignments, including interviews in which eighth graders asked high school students, “What do you wish your parents understood about you?” He also shared tapes from a Youth Radio Project, in which students created audio essays addressing the question, “What is culture?” In both cases, the assignments worked to move students outside the classroom, and to connect them to their community in interesting and exciting ways.
Indeed, the assignments of the Place-Based curriculum are rooted in an idea that John Dewey expressed in From School and Society:
From the standpoint of the child, the great waste in the school comes from his inability to utilize the experiences he gets outside the school in any complete and free way within the school itself; while on the other hand, he is unable to apply in daily life what he is learning in school. That is the isolation of the school–its isolation from life (75).
Place-based curriculum works to tear down the wall between life and school. In doing so, it adheres not only to Dewey’s philosophy but also to the principles of active learning. Place-Based Curriculum requires students first to actively explore the phenomena around them as the basis of critical inquiry. In working with phenomena first-hand, students become the creators rather than the consumers of knowledge. As students explore their world, they are driven by their concerns rather than their teacher’s—instead, the teacher is a friendly and knowledgeable guide, helping students to make connections between what’s happening inside the classroom and what’s happening outside. In the end, the divide between the school and the community is eliminated. Students are not only active learners, but active members of the “place” in which they live.
All good reasons for faculty to consider how Place-Based Curriculum can serve their courses.
Related files:
- Gregory Sharrow: Ethnographic Inquiry as a Tool for Community Discovery. Community Works Journal, Spring 2004.
- Gregory Sharrow: The Nature of Exprience. Community Works Journal, Summer 2006.
Leave a Reply