The first article I read, Learning in Your Own Backyard: Place-Based Education for Museums by Janet Petitpas, was very interesting.  It was nice to see what museums are doing to incorporate place-based education tactics to maximize their benefits and fulfill their own institutional goals.  The article focuses on three particular places that encourage the practice of using place-based education in order to provide real experiences that are relevant to its visitors that come to the sites.  Two of these institutions, Turtle Bay Exploration Park and The Bay Area Discovery Museum, take place in what many people deem the site of typical place-based institutions, the natural environment. However, interestingly enough, there is such a thing as having place-based learning  for those that are not surrounded by the natural world. Place-based learning can occur in an urban setting, as demonstrated in the example at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum.

Place-based education is defined in the article as a process that uses local environments to teach concepts in  various subjects, such as social studies and science. This type of education tends to focus on hands on experiences that apply to the real world. This type of approach also helps one to develop stronger community ties, enhances one’s appreciation for the natural environment and even fosters a sense of commitment service. The three institutions mentioned in the previous paragraph all demonstrate this definition; however each institution has done and achieved it in different ways.

Turtle Bay Exploration Park located in Redding, California, tells the story of its people and about the area it is located. It emphasizes on the relationship between people and nature. Here the exhibits are meant to encourage exploring and questioning. It hopes to change the way you see a familiar object. For example, a visitor can see the roots of an oak tree and their extent so hopefully next time the person sees it above ground, they will think about or view the tree in a different way. An important statement made in this section was that people are better able to understand new ideas when they can connect them with an earlier experience. This is definitely true for me. I often learn and remember things better if I can connect to them somehow in my own life or to an experience I had. This is also true for many other people because it is much easier to remember something that you experienced or did personally than it is to just remember and understand an extraneous fact that has no meaning or context for you.

The Bay Area Discovery Museum is also set in the natural environment. It is located in a National Park beneath the Golden Gate Bridge.  The mission of the museum is to engage and educate children through the exploration of the local environment.  They had to present an authentic exhibit while still taking into account that it was targeting young children. They provided an authentic experience by offering real protective gear and real plant material to build with.  I liked that this museum took into account the audience it was targeting when designing its exhibits and had the understanding that kids like and need to be outdoors.  Children need to discover things on their own and they often will if given the opportunity to observe and think for themselves.

The Lower East Side Tenement Museum presents and interprets the history of a specific place and seeks to engage visitors in the richness of the neighborhood presently.  At this museum, place-based education is not focused on a local ecological setting, but rather on a local socio-cultural and economic setting. Here, visitors can make connections between the past and the present, challenge their assumptions about immigrants today, while also think about questions like why people immigrate.  I thought an interesting statement in this section was place connect people over time, which I think is true.  No matter how many generations of people will come and go to a particular place, they will all be connected through that one place. This particular place provides a connection to the past as well as to the present. I liked the way that this place engaged people and allowed them to reflect on their perceptions and thoughts.  The visitors’ impressions were used to engage them personally with the neighborhood and to help them learn more about the socio-cultural and economic factors that have shaped the neighborhood.  It was interesting to learn that this experience is designed to help people learn outward, first focusing on issues close to home, neighborhood and community and then focusing on issues on a larger scale. Ultimately, place-based learning in an urban setting can help students better understand the issues in their community and perhaps even play a role in shaping how those issues are dealt with locally, nationally or globally.  A very important aspect of place-based learning in an urban environment is that very different people can come together to build and improve their communities.

All these institutions provide unique environments and create experiences that that help people to learn more about a particular area or a particular issue. They offer learning experiences that focus on what is relevant to us and allow us to make connections and reflect on our ideas and thoughts.

The second article, The Best of Both Worlds: Critical Pedagogy of Place by David Gruenewald, was a challenging read. What I understood from reading is that critical pedagogy, and place-based education should be blended together, to form a critical pedagogy of place.  The article discusses several things; it analyzes the critical pedagogy, which focus the spatial parts of a social experience. It later states that a critical pedagogy of place includes reinhabitation, which is learning to live in an area that has been previously exploited, and decolonization, which is learning to recognize when an area is injured or disrupted and attempting to find the causes of the disruption.  I also learned that this critical pedagogy of place calls us to reflect on the kind of education we seek and the places we choose to live and later leave for others in the future. I hopefully learn more about what the author has to say on this topic as I read the article over and as we discuss it in class.