Promise of Place: Enriching Lives Through Place-Based Education is quite a large website with many resources about place-based education, including a PDF manual called Learning to Make Choices for the Future: Connecting Public Lands, Schools, and Communities through Place-based Learning and Civic Engagement.  The manual claims that the trend of place-based education is a response to the alarming “growth of a youth culture that has turned away dramatically from nature and the outdoors.” It defines many terms related to place-based education such as service learning, environmental education,  project-based learning, experiential education, etc., which was useful for me. The website also has many examples of and links to place-based learning curriculum (mainly American) such as the Rural School and Community Trust  http://www.ruraledu.org/ and the Alaska Native Knowledge Network http://www.ankn.uaf.edu/publications/index.html

Interested in taking a look at the broader topic of place-based education (beyond the indigenous context) and in learning more about place-based education generally, I came across Foxfire, a U.S. non-profit educational organization that promotes place-based learning in the Appalachian region of northeast Georgia.  Foxfire encompasses a student magazine, a museum, and a teaching approach (“The Foxfire Approach to Teaching and Learning”). I would call the magazine, founded by high school students in 1966, an example of  “salvage ethnography” – its goal is to document the disappearing heritage of Appalachian elders and pioneer culture, and in this way (among others) is very different from a place-based Indigenous education that is part of a living culture. The magazine has been extremely successful, and is still published today. Out of this first initiative came a teacher training program that promotes the use of local resources (people, community, culture) in education. The teaching philosophy’s “10 Core Practices” espouse student-centred and active methods centred around local and student-initiated concerns, hands on approaches, reflection, and relevance beyond the classroom. The idea of relevance to an external community is an important one, I think, whether or not that community is strictly local.