Place is one of the most important dimensions of human life – we exist within a place, not outside of it. Therefore, it is no surprise that place-based education is a very effective tool in teaching almost anything. I disagree with David A. Gruenewald that place-based education is focused on ecology. Within our Macaulay Honors seminar, we had several experiences that were place-based education with social focus, which is what, according to Mr. Gruenewald, critical pedagogy is focusing on. When we were concentrating our study on people of NewYork last semester, we had visited the New York Tenement Museum. That visit had a significant impact on me – being able to see first-hand what the living conditions of immigrants were at the beginning of the last century made me realize the effort my immigrant parents undertook in order to accomplish what they have today. It also made me realize that there are many immigrants in today’s New York that live in similar conditions. It just makes me to appreciate our immigrant-attracting city and its population in a completely new light. Our walking tour of Chinatown had further enforced that understanding. It is one thing to read a book about the inhabitants of Chinatown and the hardships they go through in order to come to their country and then make a living. However, walking the streets of Chinatown and seeing the unassuming signs of employment agencies that send Chinese immigrants all over this country, made me look at that neighborhood with open eyes and allowed me to think that now I now my city a little better.

I can argue that our Macaulay Honors seminar has been employing place-based pedagogy throughout all semesters and achieving what critical pedagogy is aiming for – it made us look at our city and its population in a socially critical way. Be it the assignment about the public art in New York city, where we traveled around the city looking for community art projects. It made us make the connection of the art exhibit to the people who lived in that neighborhood. Those projects almost always carried a social message – be it environmental awareness by means of recycled fabric used as an art medium or  hope or better future in a mural in one of “troubled” neighborhoods in East New York. Our “People of New York City” semester had big use of place-based pedagogy with a goal of making us citizens who are aware of cultural diversity of our city and who would respect it and will preserve it in the future. Our current semester already had a trip to the Museum of Natural History, a visit to Central Park to study the plants there and a very interesting assignment to interview New York residents about their relationship with science and technology in every day life. These assignments add another surface aspect to our understanding of New York as a social environment where we live.