Expanding Deffinitons and Big Picture Questions

Growing Definitions of PCE:

I’ve decided for my own benefit (and whoever reads this and finds it useful) to keep a running tally of the different ways I see PCE defined by the various authors. I realize many of the definitions are similar and I am not planning on commenting on them per se, just including them as a touchstone for myself as I track the way the others define the concept and its development in my own thinking.

Gruenewald and Smith suggest PCE, “can be understood as a community-based effort to reconnect the process of education, enculturation, and human development to the well-being of community life. Place-based or place-conscious education introduces children and youth to the skills and dispositions needed to regenerate and sustain communities. It achieves this end by drawing on local phenomena as the source of at least a share of children's learning experiences, helping them to understand the processes that underlie the health of natural and social systems essential to human welfare. In contrast to conventional schooling with its focus on distant events and standardized knowledge, education conscious of place systematically inducts students into the knowledge and patterns of behavior associated with responsible community engagement.” (Emphasis added)

Brooke, in “Place-Conscious Education, Rural Schools, and the Nebraska Writing Project’s Rural Voices, Country Schools Team,” writes, PCE is “schooling that focuses on the necessary relations—cultural, natural, agriculture—that shape a given place and its human communities. By centering education in local civic issues, history, biology, economics, literature, and so fourth, learners will be guided to imagine the world as interdependent, filled with a variety of locally interdependent places, and to develop a richer sense of citizenship and civic action” (6). I particularly like this definition because if its focus on interdependence and the line it draws outward from the local community to the larger world, explaining PCE’s usefulness and benefit beyond the immediate situation.

Trends and observations from the three selections collectively:

AS I read each of the three selections, I found myself consistently returning to several questions, concerns, and ideas that seemed to appear in each text in varying ways. In order to hopefully avoid writing such a ridiculously long response this week, I thought I might first make a few brief and more general comments on the ideas the three pieces raise collectively and then comment more specifically on each of them, siting how I see these ideas and themed raised in each text individually.

Firstly, though I know this week’s readings were intended to focus on the role of PCE in rural communities, I could not stop asking myself how this type of education can (if at all) play out in urban areas and large schools which are embedded in large school districts. It seems that it is much easier to involve students in community-based work when the communities in which schools are situated are smaller. I think that by default, the smaller the community the more linked its people often are together and the easier it is to get local businesses and organizations on board with large scale cross- and inter-institutional projects. For example, when Jimmy’s dad is on the city board for park’s and everyone knows him, and everyone in a community’s kids attend the same school, it doesn’t seem as difficult to get the school linked up with the Jimmy’s dad and his project and the town is less likely to protest because they know Jimmy’s dad and thus are also more likely to be involved.

What happens, though, when we translate this notion to say, Omaha North high school, where the student population is much, much larger and much more diverse and the activities the school and its teachers can engage in are much more tightly regulated by the larger school district of which Omaha North is a part? To engage in a project, you first have to have a teacher or teachers who have some connection to a community project or organization, then you have to encourage a much more diverse group of parents to get on board with the project and, at very least, allow their children to participate in a project that they themselves may feel much less connected to as they don’t necessarily feel tied to the communities in which they live. Then, you have to find the funding for even simple things like school busses to travel to such projects (if necessary) and you have to secure school district approval for engagement in the work. I’m not saying its impossible to do this kind of work in urban areas (obviously not as, we’ve read examples of it being done) I’m just suggesting it might be a great deal more difficult to orchestrate.

A second trend I have noticed in the readings is an effort by PCE educators to use PCE as a means of engaging in both cross-disciplinary work with students and while also meeting standards with this work. Fundamentally I think this is precisely the shape education should take and the kind of work we should be doing, what troubles me, though, is that it seems in order to really have this “PCE thing” take off and have any real impact it may require an entire restructuring of our educational system. The trouble is, especially once students are in high school where they are taking a wide range of class and in an almost endless number of combinations, it becomes much harder to engage in long-term inter-disciplinary work. Mrs. Jones, the English teach teacher, and Mrs. Smith, the biology teacher, can’t just decide to have their students work together to explore, say water management in an area, because Mrs. Jones and Mrs. Smith don’t likely have the same students and in order to have the students do the kind of work they need to do, the teachers will likely need more time than there 50 minute class period will allow. They can’t combine their class because they don’t have the same students and it’s not fair to the students or other teachers to pull students from another class to work on Mrs. Jones and Mrs. Smith’s project.

I have the sense that, in order for this “movement” to take a hold and have a larger impact beyond “this one time we did this really cool, fuzzy feel-good project in Mrs. Green’s class where we learned to appreciate our town and its history,” this kind of inter-disciplinary work needs to be happening. But what worries me is that it can’t happen on a larger scale and involve all or most of the students from a school for any length of time without involving an entire restricting of our educational system in which we utilize much smaller school communities and design curriculum in such a way that cross-curricular work is logistically possible and encouraged.

I don’t mean to be a “negoid,” as my mother would term it, or a constant critic, it’s just that I really am inspired by these ideas and I think they have real potential, but I am also endlessly frustrated when I read and see them primarily implemented in single classrooms or small schools. I think the ideas inherent in PCE, as our various authors have explained, them have real potential to change our educational system, but where do we start? What comes first, individual classroom implementation or efforts at system change? Can you ever change the system if your efforts are focused on individual classroom implementation and the system prevents wider spread of ideas or use?

…Sorry. I’m sort of a big picture person and sometimes it all just becomes too much for me.

Gruenewald and Smith, “Making Room for the Local”

Scrolled in the margins of Gruenewald and Smith’s introduction, next to the lines, “The process of formal education in schools and universities is often totally isolated from the immediate context of community life. Interaction with the wider community and all the learning opportunities these could afford is overlooked in the push for each student to meet prescribed content area standards through decontextualized classroom instruction,” I have the word “Amen!” written. While as I read Gruenewald and Smith’s argument about the detriments of globalizations and the particularly negative effects it has on education, I can’t help but beg of them some evidence for the claims they are making, I do fundamentally agree with the sentiment of their piece and their assertion that much of our education has become decontextualizes and separated from the community. I would add to their claims that much of what is missing from our education is any sort of “real world” context. Much of the learning students are asked to do, weather in Language Arts classrooms or elsewhere, have little to do with the worlds they either currently inhabit or soon will inhabit. Education used to be designed, and still is in many tribal communities, to prepare children for the work of adulthood and for community citizenship. But now I often have the sense that education is as much a holding pen for children—slowing the stream of workers into the work force—as it is actually teaching students anything. I would agree that linking students to community based learning is key to improving our education system, but I would also suggest that before this can happen we need create stronger communities and (as other authors have suggested) schools can be the center of these communities. But in order for this to happen I firmly believe we will likely need to do one of two things: either A). decrease the size of our schools (in urban and suburban areas) so that students to do feel a sense of community and connectivity, B). or work extremely diligently to create smaller, self-contained communities within the larger school so that students can develop a sense of place and connectivity and teachers can truly “know” there students. I have seen such a community work extremely well during my teaching in Germany and perhaps, someday, when I have more time, I’ll write more about this group.

Brooke, “Place-Conscious Education, Rural Schools, and the Nebraska Writing Project’s Rural Voices, Country Schools Team:”

What most struck me about Brooke’s chapter, and particularly the three guiding principles he lays out (page 13) is the emphasis PCE places on what I’d call “real world” learning. In order to be successful, PCE must be firmly rooted in the real world contexts in which students live. As I read, I was reminded of my own education and without a doubt the most meaningful learning experiences I have had are those which were “hands on” and grounded in real world contexts. For example, when I think back on my college education, one of the experiences from which I learned the most took place far from the classroom. Serving for five years on the University’s Student’ Affairs Senate taught me lessons in writing, math, politics, business, and leadership that I never could have gleaned from even the best classroom conversation. I, then, would agree completely that we must strive to ground students’ learning in the “real world” around them but I constantly struggle to do this.

I think my struggle comes in part because I sometimes have trouble identifying the “real world” that students live in (particularly at the college level). I know that probably sounds ignorant of me, but each students’ context is so very different and the “real worlds” they live and the “real worlds” they plan to enter are often very different from one another and very different from my own. Secondly, I’ve found that when I try to create these kinds of real world learning experiences, like having students examine the people around them by interviewing and writing profile essays on them, the assignments wind up coming across as somehow artificial and contrived. I’m wondering, given the working conditions of teachers and their incredible time limitations, how many of them will have time (and energy) to seek out the larger scale place-conscious learning experiences described in Brooke’s (and other’s) article. For example, I see a rather wide disconnect between the kinds of work done by the students featured in the Ne TV segments and the social justice, culturally and ecologically conscious, real world activities that are described by Gruenewald and Smith, Brooke, and Sobel. I’m not skeptical, so much as just not fully sold yet on the real wide-spread impact these ideas can have.

Those of you who are practicing teachers, at whatever level, with much more experience than me, I look forward to hearing your perspectives and how you might implement PCE in your classrooms.

Gruchow, “What We Teach Rural Children”

In many ways I felt drawn to the story Gruchow shares and compelled by his sense of nostalgia and remorse over the loss of local farming and the values that rural children are learning today. However, what troubles me about his piece is while I think his points about local agriculture and rural cultural shifts are true, the fact of the matter is that we can’t go back to the way things were. In lament of the loss of family farming and the new roles played by machinery (rather than people), he fails, in my perspective to acknowledge the truly very hard work that farming is. Though these changes may be creating the problems he suggests, the trouble is that we can’t expect people to be better than people have ever been. As humans we are drawn to things that maker our work easier and farm labor, even with modern machinery is extremely hard work. As much as I say that I love agrarian culture and dream of one day living on a farm/ranch, my brief experiences with “hobby farming” tell me that I might not be cut out for the work. The kind of farming Gruchow misses, as he notes, requires lots of human labor power, 4 AM calf feedings, 15+ hour work days, and lots of potential injury to workers.

Moreover, I fear that he fails to acknowledge the kinds of cultural shifts that have accompanied modern farm work and what cultural losses we may experience in reverting to a traditional agrarian culture. The advent of corporate farming (ad much as I hate them) and mechanization, for example, went hand-in-hand with women’s liberation. With farms no longer requiring ten farm hands and large working families, women were no longer so critically necessary to home life,; providing the cooking, cleaning, and other domestic duties. With husbands who could go work for large scale farm operations, women have been able to enter the work force as well. Often I dream of a life in which I produce my own vegetables, can my own food, eat meat that my family slaughters, bake my own bread, and work alongside a husband in a field, but the fact of the matter is, my great-grandmother did that. And though she did it well, was a strong and educated woman, such work left little room for other pursuits in her life. College was out of the question and working even more so. As much as I want to return to locally based rural and agricultural culture, I worry it would also mean asking for an entire restricting of culture. Could we sift back to a culture in which one parent is home to provide the necessary domestic work and how many of us would really be willing to give up the convenience of Wal-Mart or Target to dos o?