Place-Based Learning: Connecting Kids to Their Community (Transcript)

Michael: Is there more than one way to figure out how big an acre is?

Students: Yes.

Michael: Could it be two feet wide?

Student: Uh-huh.

Michael: Right, it’s going to be really long, right.

Brent: What works for student learning is engaging kids with their environment. It could be about the local culture. It could be about the local history. It could be so many different things. But finding that inspiration in your community is key. When kids are engaged with a curriculum, they learn it.

Michael: Any questions?

Students: No.

Michael: All right, make it so, do it up.

Brent: What place based education does is connecting learning to your own environment. Your own environment can look many different ways. It can be an urban environment. It could be suburban, it could be rural.

Laura: It can be the buildings of the place. It can be the landscape of this place. It can be the stories of the place.

Sarah: This year is Hood River County school district’s one hundred and fiftieth anniversary. And we decided that since our building is one of the most historic buildings in the district, and we have some space, we decided to take the old ticket office and turn it into a museum.

Emma: It is really cool to learn about Hood River and Oregon. We started by making a timeline and it’s going to wrap around the perimeter of the museum. And then there’s also going to be some major events that happen in the world.

Sarah: We’re going to have a lot of World War Two things here. I’m going to say somewhere in that corner over there.

Emma: We took a field trip. We walked downtown and Miss Segal gave us pieces of paper that had pictures on them of what the downtown looked like back then. And we had to find where the locations were and then look at how it looked now. It was a lot more interesting to learn about and you really want to know, because you can relate to it.

Sarah: What do I hope the kids get out of it? That they get to better know their community, and they have a pride in their space.

Laura: Here in Hood River, we live in this very unique landscape. The Columbia River Gorge. So that was a really obvious place to start when we’re talking about geology.

Student: How many layers are there?

Student: Three.

Laura: There’s been seven catastrophic events that have created this landscape. And so you can talk about volcanoes, you can talk about lava flows. You can talk about earthquakes. You can see the different layers of rocks and the geologic history of time.

Lauren: When we’re done with this model, it will display what the gorge looks like and how landslides have been carving the gorge. So the first layer, which is the clay, is the Ohanapecosh layer. The second layer is the Eagle Creek formation, which is mainly soil. And the third layer, a salt layer, is made up of larger rocks. If you walk on some of the trails, like Wahclella Falls, which we visited, you can actually see where the landslides could occur. When landslides happen, it’s because of water weathering down. Those three layers get really moist and eventually erode. So now we’ll model an example of a landslide when it rains. As you can see, the soil gets brought down and sometimes the small rocks do as well, which leaves the Ohanapecosh bare.

Student: Okay.

Lauren: Sweet, it worked.

Laura: My hope for my students when they leave my class is that they can be stewards of the world that they live in. Place based education is also skills that you can use to understand the community that you’re living in.

Michael: Being able to understand how you fit into a system is a really important part of middle school. And we try really hard to be able to get kids to understand, what’s their role and what’s going on around them.

Michael: Into that area, because that’s what one acre is.

Student: Okay, that makes sense.

Michael: We are in the process of studying fire ecology. There’s a lot of fires that happen in our area, and we know that the reporting unit that they give us how big a fire is, is often in acres. We’ve also been studying algebra and so we’re using a one step equation here to be able to physically pace it out and put it onto the ground, so they can start having a gut understanding of what an acre really is.

Okay, so get your calculators out, figure out your pace.

Student: Okay, do a hundred divided by forty-five paces.

Michael: The whole idea was, let’s do things that put math in context and let’s create problems that the kids want to solve and then give them the tools math wise to be able to do that.

Student: And then walk that way two hundred steps.

Student: How many steps?

Student: Two hundred, because we did four hundred feet.

Student: One, two…

Brent: I think what works for student learning is engaging kids with their environment and how you define that environment is really up to the kids, the community and the teacher. All of us need to feel like we’re connected to something. Place based learning provides kids with that home base, and now they can start exploring.

Student: Thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two…

Schools That Work

Hood River Middle School