In this paper I argue that the theory and practice of place based education can increase the awareness of future teachers about their own potential to educate their students to the importance of sustainable practices, especially where it is supplemented by land education.  Gruenewald (2003) theorizes place based education as moving from the perceptual through the sociological to the ecological.  Tuck and McKenzie (2015) acknowledge the need to incorporate a form of land education that critiques colonial history and the displacement and genocide of Indigenous peoples in North America (Calderon (2014); King (2012)).

The paper is based upon my recent experience teaching a course in place based education to a group of Early Childhood Educators in a teacher education program at a Canadian university.  The philosophical framework is presented in order to show that education can enhance both personal growth and social change (Whitehead, 1957).  Evidence is then considered from the educators’ final assignments in the course, providing a rich source of data in which changes to their understanding are chronicled, often related to the various places we visited during the term.          

One of the major shifts in awareness among some of the Early Childhood Educators was the importance of Indigenous concepts of land.  During the term, we had considered how place based education articulates a distinction between being an inhabitant of place (where one appreciates its unique attributes and recognizes the limits to economic growth) and a resident of place (where one is primarily a consumer, alienated from both self and place) (Orr, 1992).  After our visit to a First Nations Heritage Park and reading articles on Indigenous cultures, some of the educators began to ask if one can only truly be an inhabitant of place if one regards the land as the source of life, both physical and spiritual.  They suggested that land education may be a more comprehensive approach than place based education because it conceives of land as having intrinsic value rather than being a commodity.  This alternative view provides educators and students with the possibility to rethink their relation to land in deeply ecological ways. 

According to Gruenewald (2003), one of the benefits of place based education is that it enables students to contextualize knowledge, relating it to their experience and interests, and making it more accessible than abstract knowledge.  This, I argue, is what happened with the Early Childhood Educators who became aware of the need for land education in the context of a Canadian province in which Indigenous students comprise 30% of the school population.  They were learning how to listen to the land as a source of life rather than of monetary profit.  This important insight could provide the basis for them to conceive of education for sustainability as the recognition that life and the land are the primary source of sustenance (McMurtry, 2015).

References

Calderon, D. (2014). Speaking back to Manifest Destiny: A land education-based approach to critical curriculum inquiry. Environmental Education Research. 20(1), 24-36.

Gruenewald, D. (2003). Foundations of place: A multidisciplinary framework for place-conscious education. American Educational Research Journal. 40(3), 619-654.

King, T. (2012). The inconvenient Indian: A curious account of native people in North America. Toronto, Doubleday.

McMurtry, J. (2015). Collective life capital: The lost ground of the economy. The World Economic Review. 30 July, 1-6.

Orr, D.W. (1992). Ecological literacy: Education and the transition to a postmodern world. Binghamton, SUNY Press.

Tuck, E. & McKenzie, M. (2015). Place in research: Theory, methodology, and methods. New York, Routledge.

Whitehead, A.N. (1957). The aims of education and other essays. New York, The Free Press.

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