Does Community-Centered Education Matter?

Department of

Education knows it matters

What is community-centered education?

• More expansive than traditional environmental education (and with less baggage)

• Teaches about both the natural and the built environment

• How landscape, community infrastructure, watersheds, and cultural traditions interact and shape each other

The Great Waste

From the standpoint of the child, the great waste in the school comes from his inability to utilize the experiences he gets outside the school in any complete and free way within the school itself; while, on the other hand, he is unable to apply in daily life what he is learning at school. That is the isolation of the school—its isolation from life.

John Dewey (1891)

Crisis in the Narrative

Environment

Epidemic of Disengagement

Lack of “narrative fit”between the stories of schoolingand students’ personal lives

Slip out of Abstraction

Community-Centered education:

“the process of using the local community and environment as the starting point to teach concepts. . .”

David Sobel (Place-Based Education: Connecting Classrooms & Communities)

Benefits of Community-Centered Teaching

• Increases academic achievement• Helps students develop stronger

relationships to their community• Enhances students’ appreciation for the

natural world• Creates heightened sense of civic

engagement• Increases citizen and parent involvement• Helps community development

Engaged in the

real work

Meaning Motivates

Deepening by contextualizing

[When] the student is in the community, researching aspects of a local watershed, conducting community health surveys, developing exhibits for the local museum, the quality of the work deepens greatly, is more carefully attended to, assumes genuine meaning.

Vito Perrone: Annenberg Rural Challenge Research and Evaluation Program, 1999

The Habitof Science

Education as cultureHow are the understandings we

seek manifest locally and regionally?

Learning as story

The adventure of researchreading, taking notes, observing, experimenting, presenting

Community-Centered Teaching:truth in a local dialect

Communities of purpose

Linking community and scholarship

Accountability in the Community

Exhibitions of masteryand more. . .

The three-legged stool

• Academic achievement

• Social Capital• Environmental quality

Placemaking

Michael L Umphreymlumphrey@flatheadreservation.org

406 370-4369

http://www.montanaheritageproject.org