The first article, Learning in Your Own Backyard spoke about place-based education, and how research has shown that it results in higher grades in students as well as a better understanding of their subject material. I agree that it’s a good idea to be learning subjects on-location, especially if that subject can be explored in the physical world.  This makes sense because we believe what we can observe with our senses. If you can see an object and hit it with a hammer, and hear it make a clang, then you can be positive it’s there. Anything beyond that type of learning is conceptual and requires a stretch of the imagination. Even babies and children learn through tactile exploration. They travel through their space, touch everything they see, and manipulate items that grab their curiosity. They don’t listen to lectures. For this reason, it would be much more interesting to learn about the evolutionary relationship between raccoons and bears by feeling their pelts (or synthetic pelts) and making a judgement off of that. Or rather than first explaining how and why plants lean toward the sun, one can be planted indoors next to a windowsill, to display how it will lean toward the window no matter which direction you turn the pot.

I went to the Tenement Museum myself in my junior year of high school, and I remember many of its details very vividly. First we had a lesson on immigrants in the Lower East Side (of which I don’t remember so vividly), and then we explored the apartments they lived in, which are preserved in the most original state as possible. Actors portray the immigrants as we walk into these apartments, and we get to see the cramped living conditions, speak to the “immigrants” about their lives, and even see a lot of the different tools they used back then, such as a heavy clothes iron made out of metal that doesn’t even run on electricity. The point of all this description is to display how much more I was able to remember from an experiential memory rather than from lectures I received in class.

Once our interest in a subject is sparked however, we need to be able to explore deeper as humans. This is where critical pedagogy comes in. David Gruenewald explains in Best of Both Worlds how teachers need to challenge our thoughts with new information. This reminds me of the concept of juxtaposition in Surrounded by Science, where misconceptions about science are challenged as a method of sparking interest, as well as teaching more accurate information. A lecture setting is necessary after initial exposition to explain the subject matter. Eventually, a student needs to learn about what goes on at the cellular level that causes a plan to lean towards the sun. This can’t always be observed, and would require an animation and an explanation. It’s only through a mix of critical pedagogy and place-based learning that we can fully understand a subject.