The principles of place-based education provide good guidance for course organisers to ensure that the course makes full use of local potential and is embedded in the local context.
Background
Place-based education is a pedagogical approach that emphasises the use of local communities and environments where learning takes place. It seeks to connect students with their immediate environment and to foster a deeper understanding of local culture and ecological systems. In the context of entrepreneurship education, it facilitates the identification of local opportunities and helps to harness existing potential.
The article Getting Started With Place-Based Education, Step-by-Step published on the Teton Science Schools’ website summarises the benefits and goals of place-based education:
- Learning is grounded in local communities and contexts
- Learning experiences are student-centred and personalised
- Learning is relevant and engaging
- Social-emotional learning can be a priority
- Instruction can be interdisciplinary
- Lessons can be inquiry-based
- Students can be challenged to see the world through ecological, political, economic and social lenses
- Students can have more agency and autonomy — boosting motivation and persistence
- Design-thinking can be encouraged
- Students can meet deeper learning outcomes
- Students gain a better appreciation and understanding of the world around them
Promising Practices
The following considerations have been adapted from the National Park Service’s publication “Learning to Make Choices for the Future – Connecting Public Lands, Schools, and Communities through Place-based Learning and Civic Engagement“.
Grounded in the particular attributes of your place
Local economical and cultural systems serve as the context for learning across disciplines, with a meaningful portion of the learning taking place out of the classroom, on-site in the local community and environment.
Multigenerational and multicultural
Programs connect students with their community and support the development of appreciation for the diverse talents and perspectives of others.
Supported by partnerships
A diversity of local public and private organisations form long-term, mutually beneficial partnerships in support of the entrepreneurship education.
Project-based and investigation-focused
Students are provided with opportunities to apply critical-thinking skills as they conduct comprehensive, experiential investigations into economical and cultural systems and work toward resolution of real community issues.
Relevant
Programs contribute to the community’s vitality and quality of life by addressing specific community-identified priorities and challenges.
Valued by program leaders
Leadership of schools and community partner organisations recognise the program as being integral to achieving other institutional goals, including addressing educational standards.
Student focused
Learning experiences are custom tailored for the local audience and to students’ individual learning styles and are designed with student input including a focus on issues that are personally relevant to the learners.
- Interdisciplinary – Learning integrates content and skills from multiple subject areas.
- Collaborative – Educators share the workload among their colleagues, administrators, students and community members, all of whom have active roles and responsibilities.
- Reflective – Students and the educational team (teachers, administrators, community partners) use multiple reflection and evaluation techniques before, during and after the learning experiences to assimilate their learning and examine the extent to which the learning experience has met school and community goals.
- Expanding in scope—The development of sense of place and local knowledge serves as the foundation for understanding and participating appropriately in regional and global issues.
Strategies for Engagement with the Local Community
The publication “Learning to Make Choices for the Future – Connecting Public Lands, Schools, and Communities through Place-based Learning and Civic Engagement” also provides valuable recommendations for civic engagement that can be adapted to create strong links between the entrepreneurship education and the local community.
Learn about your community
- Cultivate an intimate knowledge of the local community: its landmarks, history, businesses, civic organisations…
- Go where people are—don’t wait for them to come to you.
- Read local publications, such as newsletters and circulars.
- Develop strong interviewing and listening skills on your students and staff. Model these skills in your school.
Develop authentic community relationships
- Learn about local people as people.
- Go into the inner offices of local stakeholders, and invite them into yours.
- Regularly share meaningful, detailed information about your work through blogs, emails, and newsletters.
- Become a part of things—join a local board and become an active member of local organisations.
- Use your influence to be helpful, even when it doesn’t benefit you.
- Using volunteers and key community supporters, throw a really good party (promotion, food, and celebratory elements).
Continually seek and establish relevance in your program
- Demonstrate links between history and contemporary interests and needs.
- Use your site as a springboard for the study of contemporary issues.
- Create diverse opportunities for engagement.
- Make clear linkages to local concerns such as health, obesity, affordable housing, land use, public access to recreational land and facilities, quality after-school care, substance use/abuse, transportation, public safety…
Reach deeply and broadly to diverse stakeholders
- Involve a range of stakeholder groups in program design, implementation, and evaluation.
- Pull in all possible perspectives, coming from a range of communities of place and interest— both immediate stakeholders and people with no obvious links.
- Pull in the disenfranchised or disinterested and elicit their ideas. Make visible the value you place on public voice.
- Encourage your local communities to undertake community-wide visioning sessions.
Develop effective partnerships
- Share mission statements.
- Dialogue to develop a sense of common purpose and a vision for your collaboration.
- Do a small, concrete project together early on, to learn how to work effectively with one another before the stakes are high.
- Give up something.
- Share credit.
- Follow their advice.
- Rely on their strengths—don’t do it all.
Know what’s possible
- Know where you have room to flex within your regulations, and how to do it.
Take time
- Document successes and failures, share, and learn from them. Examine lessons from past activities.
- Know that you will need to repeat these processes over time as people and issues change. Prepare for that.
