The surest way to marry theory to practical knowledge is through practice and real-world reference. If you can see the information you’ve learned in action, then you can internalize the lesson and inspire yourself and others. Learning in Your Own Backyard: Place-Based Education for Museums was fascinating for this reason. I was especially interested in her account of the Turtle Bay Exploration Park and the Tenement Museum.

Place-based education focuses on using environments to reinforce lessons. By showing students that their lessons can be found in the real world, they lend gravity to the information taught. By walking through a museum, students can start to bridge that gap from classroom to reality – that the things they learn are real, and they do matter in the real world.

I visited the Tenement Museum last year with my Seminar 2 professor. Immigration in New York was something that existed on the peripherals of my perception. I was vaguely cognizant of it, but I never appreciated the human struggle that they went through. The Tenement Museum changed all that from my first step inside. As I went through each floor, I remembered that people lived, breathed, ate, and cried in this building. A young boy practiced boxing on his own to kill time, as I saw from a boxing manual and some weights in a bedroom.  The Tenement Museum was absolutely beneficial in making the lessons I learned in The Peopling of New York real. It absolutely aided in reflection, as I thought about the experiences people back then went through and then what my own mother and father went through when they came to America. The sense of alienation and the need to stick with your own people is something I’ll never quite get – but the Tenement Museum certainly made me think about it in a way I hadn’t quite before. Place-based education makes students care about their subjects by reminding them that this isn’t knowledge for a test – its knowledge for real life.