Place-based education is crucial to the way we understand and absorb different educational topics. By grounding the topic in a familiar location, it’s easier for the student to relate to the topic on a personal level, and it’s easier to introduce new things because those things will already be tied to the student’s prior knowledge. This is true of when studying science in a certain place, because we understand that because nature works one way in one location, it might work similarly or differently in a different location. For example, during BioBlitz, our guide told us that sometimes the frogs come out after a light rain, and they’d mostly be around ponds or up in trees. With this knowledge, we know that frogs might also populate ponds or trees in other forested regions, likely ones where it might rain. Learning about science in a certain place can allow us to make inferences about the rest of the world.

The Petitpas article discussed service learning, a way that place-based learning stimulates learners by making them a part of the upkeep and the maintenance of a certain place. What it does is feed a student’s desire to be a part of something greater; to contribute to a mechanism or a world that couldn’t exist the same way without them. This is a very interesting concept, one that I’m certain would instill in the student a respect for community service. At my high school, we were mandated to do two hours of community service every week. I worked in the video office at my school, and I was a valuable part of the program – I did routine maintenance on all the equipment, kept the office tidy, shot necessary b-roll for school projects, logged video and tapes, etc. Without me or the other students in the program, it would be hard to keep the film program at the school running smoothly, so we were a necessary constituent. At the same time, we learned a lot of aspects of digital videography and filmmaking, all things that fall under the categories of photographic and computer science. Thus, place-based education contributed to my education, while feeding a need to feel necessary.

What really interested me about the second reading was the idea of critical pedagogy. The definition of it, as provided by Burbules and Berk, is that it’s essentially a way of working with students to understand how they internalize institutionally enforced modes of self-doubt that would inevitably obstruct their abilities to think, learn, and excel. This tends to be rooted very strongly in place. This explains why children in deprived regions (the inner city, lower-income neighborhoods) are find themselves so behind. They are in a desert of deprivation when it comes to economic, and therefore educational, resources, what with underfunded schools and lack of enrichment opportunities, and this directly affects their ability to learn about science and to learn about themselves. Thus, critical pedagogy’s intent to educate students on these realities, these social and economic constructions that exist to keep them shackled, is a necessary one, and that direction of study is very practical. Sister Souljah, a hip-hop artist and activist in the 90’s, proclaimed how the institutions set up by such minds as Cornel West and Tony Brown to enrich young African-Americans were not effective because they did not educate on “the history of African people…[the fact] that America is business and without business [they] will have nothing and be nothing…[and] how to organize business so that [they] would be able to develop institutions in [their] own community.” Essentially, what she is arguing is that these institutions are lacking critical pedagogy; they try to treat a symptom without treating the disease. They do not explain how place creates situations based on social, political, and economic conditions. I think Sister Souljah would agree with the quote from Haymes that it’s necessary to “establishing pedagogical conditions that enable blacks in the city to critically interpret how dominant definitions and uses of urban space regulate and control how they organize their identity around territory, and the consequences of this for black urban resistance”.