Both authors of these two articles, “Learning in Your Own Backyard: Place-Based Education for Museums” and “The Best of Both Worlds: A Critical Pedagogy of Place” emphasize the importance of incorporating outside surroundings into the process of learning. The first article focuses solely on place-based learning, which entails concentrating on environments to better understand concepts in many different subjects. Janet Petitpas stresses that place-based learning reaps many benefits for students aside from just performing better in school. As previously discussed in Surrounded by Science, informal learning experiences that incorporate interaction with the surroundings allows these students to make connections between what they learn and previous knowledge they obtained. They learn how to actually participate in science rather than simply reading about what happens, and are better able to apply their knowledge to other unfamiliar encounters. Like we have discussed previously in class, these unique learning experiences allow students to better remember the material they learn and benefit from exploring their misconceptions. This article focuses on three informal learning spaces, namely the Turtle Bay Exploration Park, Lower East Side Tenement Museum, and the Bay Area Discovery Museum. Each of these locations embodies the benefits of informal science learning that we have been discussing. The Turtle Bay exhibits highlight the importance of sparking interest in the visitors by encouraging exploration of familiar things to them. When visitors connect new concepts to their previous experiences and knowledge, they can better understand how it is that science works. By becoming an active participant in the community, these students become part of a place in which science learning thrives. This service learning which is an important component of placed-based education is similar to what we did during the BioBlitz for Macaulay Honors College. We served the community, interacted with the New York City learning space that is Central Park, and learned science skills in the process. The second place that the article discusses is the Tenement Museum which I visited with my Macaulay Seminar class last year. This was a very moving experience for me because not only did I learn about the immigrant story, but I also connected on a personal level because my family went through similar circumstances when they arrived in New York City. I understood more about the city I call home, the people who lived there, and also my family history. This museum serves as a very important link between the past and the present, and continues to remind us that we are constantly shaped by our environment in much the same way as we shape the places that we interact with. Hearing the stories about the immigrant families from the workers at the museum was interesting and informative. They encouraged dialogue and conversation, let us ask questions, and this helped us reflect on the experience. This also goes back to the crucial role of interaction and communication in informal learning. The third location, the Bay Area Discovery Museum, discussed the challenges of designers to create memorable experiences that will capture the interests of small children. Since it is important to build an important learning foundation from an early age through exploration of the world around them, designers strived to incorporate the natural environment into the learning experience.

The second article aimed to blend between two schools of thought in education “critical pedagogy” and “place-based education” to create a hybrid referred to as “critical pedagogy of place.” David A. Gruenewald argues that by incorporating the best of each tradition, scientists and learners can broaden and deepen their knowledge. They not only have to reflect critically but also become involved in a relationship with a learning space. I completely agree that it is necessary to not only read words to learn but also experience the world. These two approaches are intertwined and one could not effectively function without the other. According to the article, “a critical pedagogy of place…encourages teachers and students to reinhabit their places…to pursue the kind of social action that improves…the places…now and in the future” (7). This way of learning creates a dynamic relationship between the scientists and their natural surroundings, and fosters the understanding of the forces that influence the way the world functions and is itself shaped. This blend of traditional approaches to education not only strengthens the learner’s connection to the concepts, but also bolsters the development of communities within these environments.

The article “The best of Both Worlds: A Critical pedagogy of Place” by David A Gruenewald argues that “Place-based pedagogies are needed so that the education of citizens might have some direct bearing on the well-being of the social and ecological places people actually inhabit” (4). What this means exactly is that when learning about a certain topic that is place-based such as central park or a unique neighborhood, it is best to occupy yourself in that location whilst learning about it to get a better understanding of it. This was at first very confusing to me but I quickly understood the function and the practicality of this method when looking back at previous trips my colleagues at Macaulay and I went on last year.
The most memorable trip to me was visiting the Lower East Side Tenement Museum because I instantly connected the readings from class about immigrants that were struggling to fit families of 10 into a small room the size of a college dorm with what I saw when actually visiting the museum. I saw the knitting factories that the housewives’ established inside their homes to make a few extra dollars a month. I got a true feel for the living conditions that were not so apparent to me when reading the books about immigration in New York City.
Because of this realization I agree with David Gruenewald and I believe that place-based education is an exciting way for people to learn about certain topics because it connects the outside environmental world with the pedagogy of the scientific world. The Bioblitz event that most Macaulay student went to was another great example of place-based learning because we learned about all the different types of plants and animals that were located in central park, a park that is extremely well known amongst us as fellow New Yorkers. Learning about things in the park that I never even knew existed definitely brought me closer in a sense to my surroundings.

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.

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.

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”.

Daniel Bibawy

Reading through the article, I’ll be honest: I did not really understand what place-based education was or entails. However I believe these few sentences summed it up best.

“(a) it emerges from the particular attributes of place, (b) it is inherently multidisciplinary, (c) it is inherently experiential, (d) it is reflec- tive of an educational philosophy that is broader than “learning to earn”, and (e) it connects place with self and community. Perhaps the most revolutionary characteristic of place-based educa- tion—one that connects it to the Freirean tradition of critical pedagogy—is that it emerges from the particular attributes of place. This idea is radical because current educational discourses seek to standardize the experience of students from diverse geographical and cultural places so that they may compete in the global economy. Such a goal essentially dismisses the idea of place as a primary experiential or educational context, displaces it with traditional disciplinary content and technological skills, and aban- dons places to the workings of the global market.” (Grunewald, 7)

Based on this description, it seems to me that place- based education involves an experience in which the learner does most of the learning on his or her own, with guidance from the educator. Furthermore it seems that learning is done in an interactive setting and not necessarily sitting in a classroom listening to a teacher give a lecture. Lastly it seems that the learning is done through the inherent nature of the environment. The learner approaches whatever it is he or she would like to learn about the environment and learns through his or her interactions with it, while the teacher gives some input and aids the learning process without controlling it.

In my English 1012 class, I recently read the Paulo Freire’s “The Pedagogy of the Oppressed” which was frequently referenced in this article. In his piece, Freire describes the many problems with the way education is presently conducted, which he calls the “banking concept.” The teacher deposits the information into the students and withdraws it on exams, with little to no input from the students on the material being taught, the way it is taught, or the setting in which it is taught. The teacher is all knowing and the students are ignorant and listen meekly. His alternative method of teaching, which he dubs as the “problem-posing” method of teaching, seems to be much more effective to me. The teacher comes to class with a question or problem and students give their input on what the best way to go about this problem is. Students are much more interactive in class and they frequently give their input and are more aware of what is going on in the class as opposed to not paying attention when the teacher is giving a lecture. It seems to me this is the direction place-based education attempts to be going in. The educators take a step back and allow the students to teach themselves and each other and learn through an active process as opposed to a passive one.

Place is one of the most important dimensions of human life – we exist within a place, not outside of it. Therefore, it is no surprise that place-based education is a very effective tool in teaching almost anything. I disagree with David A. Gruenewald that place-based education is focused on ecology. Within our Macaulay Honors seminar, we had several experiences that were place-based education with social focus, which is what, according to Mr. Gruenewald, critical pedagogy is focusing on. When we were concentrating our study on people of NewYork last semester, we had visited the New York Tenement Museum. That visit had a significant impact on me – being able to see first-hand what the living conditions of immigrants were at the beginning of the last century made me realize the effort my immigrant parents undertook in order to accomplish what they have today. It also made me realize that there are many immigrants in today’s New York that live in similar conditions. It just makes me to appreciate our immigrant-attracting city and its population in a completely new light. Our walking tour of Chinatown had further enforced that understanding. It is one thing to read a book about the inhabitants of Chinatown and the hardships they go through in order to come to their country and then make a living. However, walking the streets of Chinatown and seeing the unassuming signs of employment agencies that send Chinese immigrants all over this country, made me look at that neighborhood with open eyes and allowed me to think that now I now my city a little better.

I can argue that our Macaulay Honors seminar has been employing place-based pedagogy throughout all semesters and achieving what critical pedagogy is aiming for – it made us look at our city and its population in a socially critical way. Be it the assignment about the public art in New York city, where we traveled around the city looking for community art projects. It made us make the connection of the art exhibit to the people who lived in that neighborhood. Those projects almost always carried a social message – be it environmental awareness by means of recycled fabric used as an art medium or  hope or better future in a mural in one of “troubled” neighborhoods in East New York. Our “People of New York City” semester had big use of place-based pedagogy with a goal of making us citizens who are aware of cultural diversity of our city and who would respect it and will preserve it in the future. Our current semester already had a trip to the Museum of Natural History, a visit to Central Park to study the plants there and a very interesting assignment to interview New York residents about their relationship with science and technology in every day life. These assignments add another surface aspect to our understanding of New York as a social environment where we live.

While I found David Gruenewald’s piece more difficult to read because he made references to pedagogical experts and theories I am not familiar with and seemed to be writing for an audience of fellow experts (or at the very least, people who are reasonably knowledgable of pedagogy), I thought he made a good point about bringing together critical pedagogy and place-based education. Learning and thinking critically about the context and social/economic/political influences of a subject are important to understanding the subject and realizing that the certain events or things that we accept as being true don’t happen in a vacuum. It is also important to receive place-based education not only to get a “real” sense of what the particular space is—whether rural and natural or urban and man-made—but also to recognize that our actions have a “direct bearing” (Gruenewald, 3) on the quality and life of that space.
Freire’s words sum up Gruenewald’s marriage of critical pedagogy and place-based education perfectly: “reading the world always precedes reading the word, and reading the word implies continually reading the world” (Gruenewald, 5). Learning about the environment—rural or urban, natural or socially constructed— we live in is not an isolated activity. Understanding the environment is connected to working to preserve or reform it.
The place-based educational spaces in “Learning in Your Own Backyard” describe Gruenewald’s point. The Turtle Bay Exploration Park, Bay Area Discovery Museum, and Lower East Side Tenement Museum all serve to teach visitors about the environment, whether it’s the ecological environment of nature’s species or the social environment that nurtured a community of a specific time, and to engage visitors to be active participants in preservation and even social and political reform. That, Gruenewald would say, is critical pedagogy of place at its finest.