Finding Their Place in the Community: Urban Education Outside the Classroom

Childhood Education, 2006 by Tolbert, Linda, Theobald, Paul

Many rooms in the school had been left unused for decades as the Cabrini-Green population declined. The teacher received permission from the principal to use one of the rooms as a "memory museum." The teacher and students discovered that many of the unused rooms were filled with treasures of all kinds: old teaching aids, maps, manipulatives, books of all kinds, etc. They found attendance sheets going back to the 1940s that listed the communities of origin for many of the black students enrolled there. Most had come from small towns in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. They even found a letter from Coretta Scott King thanking a 1968 class at Jenner that had written to Mrs. King to express their sympathy after the murder of her husband. When the new school was finally constructed, the memory museum was transported to it.

Conclusion

The students at that Cabrini-Green school were given a wonderful opportunity to learn about their community, their history, and, most important, what it means to them as individuals. The beauty of place-based education is that it can not only serve as a vehicle for learning school subjects, but also give students an opportunity to develop inter- and intrapersonal intelligence, as they work with one another and discover something about the hardships they share living in America's passed-over urban places.

Place-based lessons will always depend on the circumstances of a given location, or given school, and consequently no two will ever be the same. Teachers should recognize the fact that no matter where they are, no matter how deteriorated the neighborhood might be, math, science, music, art, literature, and history surround them. This recognition is the first step toward creating a vibrant and intellectually sophisticated learning environment, for the curriculum embedded in a community yields judgment and perspective that curriculum in textbooks cannot. Elementary students in the earliest grades can learn about why their neighborhood looks the way it does, and what they can do to make a contribution to its improvement. But most of all, they can learn how to locate sources of power and influence and participate in legally sanctioned democratic processes to make life better for their parents, grandparents, neighbors, and friends.

We should offer a caveat here, however, in terms of what is and what is not place-based education. For example, one often hears of urban students who join with teachers to clean up a vacant lot near the school, and this is a wonderful piece of community service-but it is not place-based or service learning. It could be, perhaps, if it were combined with a well-planned archeology lesson that met the overall curricular goals of the school. But merely cleaning a vacant lot is not.

Place-based education can be a wonderful motivator for students. There is consequently a strange irony in the fact that in our ostensibly well-intentioned efforts to make sure that all students learn, we have heightened our focus on the artificial curriculum of textbooks and the artificial measures of learning that test scores represent. In the process, we have crowded out the ways of teaching and learning that make students want to show up, that make them want to achieve, that give them a sense of pride in who they are and what they can do to improve where they are.