I think David A. Gruenewald puts it best in “The Best of Both Worlds: A Critical Pedagogy of Place” when he states, “Place-based educators do not dismiss the importance of content and skills, but argue that the study of places can help increase student engagement and understanding through multidisciplinary, experiential, and intergenerational learning that is not only relevant but potentially contributes to the well-being of community life.” Place-based learning is a great way to gain more knowledge about not only the scientific world, but a wide variety of topics and disciplines. It’s taking what you have learned and applying it to real world situations or experiences, which I think is the best way to learn anything. I often find myself studying for an exam for a specific subject and thinking whether or not I will actually use the information that I am learning in real life. This only discourages me from further retaining the information for future use, and I tend to automatically discard it right after taking an exam. However, I am definitely sure that if I was prompted to somehow use that information in the real world, I would be more interested in remembering what I had learned and taking the time to learn as much as I could about the given topic.

I also think that place-based education is an excellent way of getting more people involved in their own communities because it builds a symbiotic relationship between people and the environment. Just like Turtle Bay Exploration Park, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, and the Bay Area Discovery Museum, many place-based learning sites are meant to stimulate one’s interest in and increase one’s awareness of the environment that they’re currently in, be it their own home environment or a new environment that they’re visiting. For example, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum is meant to “present this story [the story of 19th and early 20th Century immigrants] in such a way that the visitors would make connections between the past and the present, confronting their assumptions about contemporary immigrants …” However, by gaining knowledge about these place-based education sites, we are unconsciously creating both physical and emotional ties to them. We associate a certain memory or a certain emotion with that learning environment, and we want to preserve it as much as we can. Thus, place-based education ultimately influences us to want to preserve the learning environments we interact with, which results in a positive outcome for both learner and environment.