EYFS Best Practice: All about ... Place-based learning

A little girl with her eyes closed rubs her hands up and down the rough bark of a tree, puts her cheek against it and breathes in its scent ... Two young boys are counting how many cars drive past the nursery gates and marking them down on a clipboard ... A class of small children chant a traditional rhyme being taught to them by someone's Grandpa ... What do these snapshots have in common? A wide range of typical early years activities, perhaps, yet all these little people could be seen to be engaged in 'Place-based Learning' (PBL).

WHAT IS PLACE-BASED LEARNING?

PBL is not a new phenomenon. It is, rather, a new term for an age-old approach (or bundle of approaches) that immerse children in their local heritage, culture and landscape. It suggests that practitioners need look no further than their own school grounds, their own community, their own built and natural environments for purposeful, relevant and engaging resources for learning about language, maths, arts, social studies - the entire curriculum.

Each PBL project is tailored by the local realities. Relevant in rural settings, small towns or urban conurbations, the approach is equally effective for nursery, primary or secondary school pupils.

Place-based Learning attempts to use the most effective developments in teaching and learning to tackle critical issues of sustainability and community development in the actual context in which young people are growing up.

In effect, elements of PBL are already practised in hundreds of early years settings up and down these islands. The immediacy and urgency of the learning needs of our youngest pupils ('Who am I? Who are we? Where is this? What shall we do next?') require immediate and urgent responses. So, nursery practitioners are well versed in making the best use of their immediate surroundings. It might even be possible to see the PBL movement as an attempt to drag existing early years practice up the age gradient and apply those approaches in primary and secondary contexts!

WHAT IS EDUCATION FOR?

Traditionally, the answer to the question 'What is education for?' goes something along the lines of, 'to give individuals the means for upward mobility and personal success ...'

Once upon a time, 'learning' happened within the context of a child's specific locality and an immediate social grouping. Parents and elders taught youngsters how to gather food, for example, an essential skill for life.

Schools triggered a profound change in what and how children learn. What happens in classrooms now often bears little resemblance to what happens in the 'real world'. Usually, children's attention is directed away from their own lives and towards knowledge of other places and times - content that has been developed by strangers that they will never meet! Learning, in most school contexts, has become something that happens from reading texts or being told about things, rather than multi-sensory encounters with the real world.

As John Dewey reminds us, 'When the child gets into the schoolroom he has to put out of his mind a large part of the ideas, interests, and activities that predominate in his home and neighborhood' (School and Society, 1899).

This disconnection between children's lived experience and 'school learning' is made worse by our national preoccupation with measuring achievement. 'Success' for a few inevitably creates many 'failures', and the lesson for many young people is that they are not valued by society. At its worst, education, driven by the 'standards' agenda, reinforces a form of individualism which contributes to uprooting, lack of participation, economic dependency and community breakdown.

David Gruenewald and Gregory Smith conclude (Place-Based Education in the Global Age, 2008, Routledge), 'Public education has become the business of training children and youth to enter the global marketplace as consumers and workers.'

Surely, the most valuable knowledge for most children is knowledge that is directly related to their own daily reality. They need knowledge that will allow them to be valued by the other people in their lives. Place-based Learning can help to overcome the disjuncture between 'school' and 'life' by adapting and responding to the unique characteristics of particular places.

Children enjoy being outdoors and working with adults who behave more like partners than supervisors. Children love learning through tackling and solving real-world problems practically. Children are motivated and engaged when they understand the point of what they are doing.

By learning about their own town or community, by seeing that they can make a difference, young people realise that their home is not such a bad place to grow up, after all.

A CURRICULUM FOR THE FUTURE

Our children will have to face the realities of climate chaos, resource depletion, international conflict and social epidemics such as alcohol abuse, violence and obesity. Perhaps it is time for us to answer the question 'What is education for?' more along the lines of, 'to empower the next generation to collectively take responsibility for the world they inhabit'.

As Paul Theobald says, 'Education can be reconfigured so that it can help us conserve dwindling natural resources, nurture democracy and put information to work in the creation of vital, vibrant communities' (Teaching the Commons: Place, Pride and the Renewal Of Community, 1997, Westivew Press)

There are three broad areas in which recent developments in educational theory and practice might have some impact on these issues: 'citizenship', 'sustainability' and 'teaching and learning'. PBL suggests that these three, seemingly disparate concerns can be given tangible relevance by uniting them in a study of place.

CITIZENSHIP

Attempting to squeeze another subject into the crowded curriculum treats each issue in isolation and fails to get to the heart of the problem. Yet it is crucial that young people develop a sense of social justice and a desire to contribute to society. So PBL suggests:

Involve your community: Bringing together different generations is critical to re-establishing the inter-generational glue that holds communities together. Invite older people in to your setting for a tea party, prepare questions, and collect, share and value the everyday stories of their lives.

Encourage entrepreneurship: Handling money is a crucial part of growing up in our society. Sell those home-grown vegetables or home-made scones, count the takings, subtract the costs and work out the profit. Then, make a collaborative decision about how to use the earnings - not, of course, out of greed, but for social good!

Explore equality and diversity: Internationalism begins at home. Children are never too young to start developing their sense of cultural belonging. They need to be immersed in stories and rhymes that represent all the cultures of their locality. Wherever we come from, we share the here-and-now, and we can all benefit from the sense of belonging to a particular place.

SUSTAINABILITY

Doom-laden global scenarios often immerse people in guilt and fear, or make sustainability issues seem too large and too distant. Yet it is crucial that the next generation commits to sustainable ways of dealing with energy, food, waste and so on. So PBL suggests:

Enjoy the outdoors: Of course children need to get outside and interact with both the natural and the man-made world. Find special places in the school grounds, grow gardens, explore mini-wetlands, categorise and analyse insects, collect things for the nature table, survey traffic, study local buildings and make suggestions for environmental improvement projects.

Learn interdependence: No-one is an island. We want our young people to accept responsibility for their own ecological and social footprint. Projects to explore our dependency on external sources of food and energy naturally give rise to empowering projects of sustainable energy production and growing food.

Develop global awareness: We want our young people to understand that the choices we make here in our own locality can have effects all around the world. So, tracking the origins of our food, clothing and other goods, and studying the lives of real people who are intimately connected to us through the production and consumption of those goods, helps us understand what gives our place its character.

TEACHING AND LEARNING

A relentless focus on 'attainment' promotes a sense of selfishness and individualism that is nothing but counter-productive for society. Yet, it is crucial that educators keep getting better at engaging, motivating and empowering young people. So PBL suggests:

Expect collaboration: How strange it is that conventional education is all about testing and grading the individual, whereas human life is always a social, collaborative endeavour. PBL projects may define roles and allocate tasks, but they are almost always collaborative.

Set a challenge: We want our children to be empowered to effect change and to develop self-belief, so planning a PBL project often involves an achievable outcome. Children like the fun of real-world problem solving. They want to do something that is genuinely useful, and they enjoy being successful.

Think creatively: The only thing we know about the future is that it will be different. The next generation will need to find creative solutions to problems we don't even know about yet. Creative problem-solving all starts with creative language, visual arts, music, drama and so on.

DOES PBL WORK?

A great deal of inspirational PBL work has already been carried out, particularly in the United States. There, the Place-Based Education Evaluation Collaborative says, 'The findings are clear: place-based education fosters students' connection to place and creates vibrant partnerships between schools and communities. It boosts student achievement and improves environmental, social, and economic vitality. In short, place-based education helps students learn to take care of the world by understanding where they live and taking action in their own backyards and communities.'

In 'The power of place', Sharon Bishop writes, 'Place-based learning, wherever that place is, teaches a sense of community and gives students a model for living well anywhere' (The English Journal, 93(6), 65-69, 2004).

Learning is multi-sensory. If we are learning about trees, we need to wander beneath them, smell them, hug them, climb them. If we are learning about food, we need to grow it, harvest it, prepare it, cook it. If we are learning about people, we need to meet them, join in with them, share stories with them.

We want our young people to have respect for the world around them. We want them to see themselves as part of something with a long history and a long future. We want to give them hope. Through real experiences in real places, perhaps they will learn to become stewards of their own special patch of our extraordinary planet. But then, early years practitioners already know all of that, don't they?

PADSTOW SCHOOL, CORNWALL

Teachers and pupils at Padstow School have been planning together and delivering learning experiences with three watchwords informing their choices:

• - 'Intergenerational', meaning that they want older people to take part, sharing life experiences and wisdom with younger people

• - 'Empowerment', meaning that they want young people to feel a lasting sense of achievement and pride in what they have created

• - 'Global dimension', meaning they want to understand how the choices they make here can have effects around the world.

The reception class were enchanted by the myth of the Mermaid of Padstow, told by a local storyteller. Using interactive storyboard techniques, they developed their own versions of the tale that explains the natural phenomenon of the 'Doom Bar' - a treacherous sand-bar across the mouth of the River Camel. Having spent some time hearing the story retold in pairs, small groups and as a whole class, they visited the locations involved and built the story characters from found materials and sand on the beach. Re-enacting the story in situ (with 'mythical sand-sculpture' help) gave the children a deeper understanding of the component features of the landscape, characters and action of the narrative. 'She's beautiful but scary, like the sea,' said reception pupil Emily.

Then, when it was time to explore and enjoy creation myths from all around the world, children seemed to have an immediate and intuitive grasp of the purpose of these fabulous tales.

Perhaps, as they grow up, their relationship with their own part of the planet will be enriched and strengthened by carrying their local mermaid myth with them through their lives.

THE GREAT TREES OF CORNWALL AT SITHNEY SCHOOL

Gwyth Meur a Gernow, the Great Trees of Cornwall, is a project that introduces pupils to seven iconic Cornish trees. From estimating the age of the thousand-year-old Darley Oak to constructing myths like the one about the Madron Thorn, children use the trees in their immediate vicinity for stimulus across the entire curriculum.

All ages of children at Sithney school joined in their tree project. Next to Sithney school is a little triangle of land that was once just scrub and brambles. The first person to cultivate this patch many years ago was Mr Roy Richards, head teacher at Sithney school for 28 years. He planted some trees and made a plot where children grew vegetables and flowers, which were sold to boost school funds.

Many of the parents of today's pupils at Sithney remembered Mr Richards and his vegetable patch with fondness. Today's schoolchildren decided to act on the stories the older villagers told them and reclaim this patch. So, after a day of tree poetry writing and gardening, they planted a young oak tree in memory of Mr Richards. The winter sun shone for the planting, and their hard work was rewarded by a robin coming to visit.

The Sithney Oak is now thriving. It will soon be joined by 'outdoor classroom' seats built from the cherry wood from a flowering cherry that had to be cut down.

Will the Sithney Oak grow to be as remarkable as the Darley Oak? We would, of course, need to wait a thousand years to see, so the Sithney Oak is today's schoolchildren's gift to the future.

MEDAS FARM KINDERGARTEN, NORWAY

Jostein and Anita Hunstad of Medas in the far north of Norway have turned their working sheep farm into an extraordinary example of Place-based Learning in practice. Medas Farm Kindergarten, in the county of Nordland, started with six children in 1998. From this autumn it will have places for 100, with 25 staff.

Astonishingly, for a kindergarten inside the Arctic Circle, the children spend 80 per cent of their time outdoors. Medas Farm has sheep, chicken, cows, lambs, rabbits, ponies and a large greenhouse. Children take part in almost all the jobs of a working farm: they feed animals, grow plants, harvest fruit and vegetables, collect eggs, and even take part in the slaughter process - although not in the kill itself, they handle dead animals and cook with them.

'We think children get a better understanding of how life is, and how life and nature are interconnected,' says Jostein. Children at Medas learn the traditional stories, prepare traditional meals and take part in the traditional calendar customs of their region.

Schools in Norway are provided with a national curriculum-framework within which they are expected to plan a local curriculum. Wenche Ronning of the Nordland Research Institute has studied and evaluated the work of Medas Farm Kindergarten and explains that Medas is in the forefront of a movement that is gaining popularity across Norway. There are now estimated to be between 60 and 100 farm kindergartens throughout the country.

www.medas.no

LAWRENCE BARNES ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, VERMONT

Lawrence Barnes Elementary School had been sitting near the bottom of school rankings in the US state of Vermont for years. The school is located in an urban downtown area, where 90 per cent of the students are considered low-income and ethnically/culturally diverse.More than 20 languages are spoken at the school.

Then the school reached out to Shelburne Farms. Over six years, the non-profit farm and education centre helped Lawrence Barnes to remake itself. Doing so meant not just getting urban children out into the community, but fundamentally reorientating teaching and learning at Lawrence Barnes around the idea that the school is part of a local, urban ecosystem - political, economic and environmental - that students can influence.

This process begins in the kindergarten, where the youngest students at the Sustainability Academy explore what a community is and how various people within communities help each other.

After exploring their classroom and school community, students learn about the various roles that people play to help their neighbourhood and surrounding community be safe, happy, and healthy. They visit diverse community helpers such as police, musicians and dancers, urban farmers, and the school nurse.

The 'Community Helpers' unit is a part of a year-long kindergarten study of community. Throughout the year, students explore the big idea of community by exploring multiple types of community, from a pond to their city neighbourhood. After exploring the essential question, 'How do different people help my community?', pupils then ask 'How can I help the community?'. The project culminates in finding practical ways that they themselves can be of service to their community. Previous examples of service have included litter-picking, tree-planting and creating neighbourhood guides.

Jen Cirillo, director of professional development at Shelburne Farms, says, 'When we help teachers make the walls of the school permeable - by bringing the students into the community and community members in as educators - we make learning come alive and relevant to every student.'

http://sa.bsdvt.org

http://www.shelburnefarms.org

• Will Coleman is a freelance educational consultant based in Cornwall. He set up www.placebasedlearning.co.uk to spread his passion for Place-based Learning. He also delivers training on developing literacy through storytelling. Contact hime at www.willcoleman.co.uk or Brave Tales Ltd, tel: 01208 873008.