Nancy Jennings

Bowdoin College

When you study rural education, it's like being a blind man with an elephant: you study just the piece you're looking at. And because rural areas are so different, and you make these vast claims as to the kind of rural areas you looked at, then if you went to another place, you'd see there are different issues. So it's been a treat to hear your concerns -- very different from concerns I normally hear in New England. I've done a fair amount in rural schools in South Carolina, and those issues are different too. If I live long enough, maybe I can see the whole elephant, in some way!

I want to talk about Place-based Education -- not just its substance, but a story about a group similar to this that has done a spectacular job of working through the system and has come away from the margins of changes in education into the center. It's an ongoing story, so I may be giving them too much credit. I don't know how it'll play out. It's an example of how a group of people from different perspectives can come together and do something somewhat meaningful.

Let me give you the definition of Place-based Education. It comes from Rachel Tompkins' group, The Rural School and Community Trust. I don't know when they came up with it, but it's on their web site and is used often by people who write about Place-based Education. They define it as:

Place-based Education is a big deal in New England and the northeast. You can understand why. We come from a tradition of local control and people who are rooted in the environment and the beauty of the place they come from. I live in a house built in 1790, and people there can tell me whose family owned it all along the way. It's a place where heritage runs deep. And so a lot of the movement of Place-based Education is rooted in places like New England. Mike, can you tell us about the far west? Is it important there? (Mike: Yes, in isolated places.)

When I went down to South Carolina last year -- I've been working there in rural area schools for ten years -- I was looking at standards and how teachers are making sense of their state standards and state assessments that happened in the last ten years. And I talked to superintendents about Place-based Education. Most didn't know about it or had no interest in it. One superintendent, from a district that has had lots of trouble going through desegregation, still has most white children going to private white-flight academies; and the public school district is primarily African-American. He said that the reason it's not powerful there is because it means sub-standard education for black kids. If you come from that tradition, the sense of having kids value their own community takes on a very different feel. Marty Strange at the Rural School and Community Trust, said recently that in communities that have division, Place-based Education needs to be handled very differently than in communities where there's a kind of unified character.

The story I want to tell about happened in Vermont. They really believe in their environment in Vermont! The advocates of Place-based Education, I've heard, are very worried about state standards, No Child Left Behind, and particularly state assessments.

The concerns are that you have to worry a lot more about reading and math proficiency, you don't really have time to take your kids into the woods and teach them about local flora and fauna, to spend time with their grandmothers and old people in the community. So the concern is that standards and assessments are going to narrow the curriculum and not let the broader, rich sense of education flourish.

The other concern is that standards and assessments drive away the experiential, hands-on discovery learning that Place-based Education is so much a piece of. Again, if you have to make kids score proficiently on a math test, it'd be easier and more efficient by practicing on a multiplication table than it might be learning about multiplication in a more experiential way.

The third concern is that standards and assessments aim to train and educate kids to be responsive to the global marketplace and not necessarily to the local needs and local industries. I think this argument goes even farther and is stronger than that. It came up in our group today. It forces teachers to think about educating kids in a de-contextualized sense, not being sensitive to who these kids are, where they come from, what their needs are, or where their attention is.

So, when Vermont went through its development of state standards, it was fairly late in the game, and they wanted to keep local control of the curriculum. The people who developed the standards had this sense that there should be a process of revision of the standards as soon as they got adopted. So, it was sort of like: here are the standards, but here is the way you change them. There's a way they did this.

There's a group of people, very similar to yourselves, who looked at the standards and said, "There's nothing here about stewardship of the land, or about kids' learning where they're from that will help them understand that where they come from is a beautiful, unique, and wonderful place that has a history. What can we do to make sure that piece of their education doesn't get lost?" And shortly after they began meeting and talking about the gap they saw, they made a critical decision to work through the system of standards and assessments, rather than choosing to stay on the outside and hammering and railing against them. I think this was a critical move they made. It's very tempting as people who feel victimized by federal and state regulations, to say, "We're going to dig in our heels and do what we do, and tell everybody that they're the bad folks out there." And there are a lot of legitimate reasons to that. The concern is that you get rolled over. And you'll lose if that's the position you take because, whether you agree or not, the standards and tests and No Child Left Behind are going to be a factor in all of our lives, for at least a few more years, if not longer. And so, how do we work within the system to do what we want to do?

And that's what the group in Vermont decided to do. An organization of environmental activists and environmental agencies, nonprofit organizations, teachers, superintendents, foundation people, state department of education people, department of agriculture people, and department of natural resources people came together and said, "OK, let's change the standards so there's a piece in here that we want, that reflects rural life and reflects what we need in rural schools. And more than that, that reflects the kind of education we want our kids to have, which is the part of learning that goes on outside of school, learning that can be embedded in what you observe in your daily life in the place that you live.”

And what they did over a course of about four years is to revise the state standards so that there are now place-based standards in the Vermont framework. And it was a difficult task. They went to the State Board twice; the first time they were sorely rejected. They spent a lot of time, and a lot of political and social capital, trying to get this maneuver to work. But it did finally work. And now they got two place-based standards put into the Vermont framework; and now they're working to get the standards as part of the state assessments. That's the key: if it's not accepted, it might get lost. The teachers really have to attend to that.

One of the issues I've been looking at is, so what? What's the effect of this? Although it's too early to tell, some of the stories that occur…

We did a statewide survey about what teachers were thinking about and how standards shape their teaching practice. One of the things we found was that many, especially the teachers in rural schools, said that when the standards group came out and when the conversation was limited to saying that these standards don't apply to rural schools or are bad for rural schools, they didn't pay much attention to them. But when it became clear they weren't going away, and that there was an initiative to make the standards workable for rural practitioners, they began to look at them more. Although it's just anecdotal information at this point, a number of teachers said, "I've learned to do what I want to do, but related to the standards. Being able to tie what I do to the standards has helped me not only clarify for myself what the goal of some of this more progressive educational type stuff is, but also not get under such heat, from parents or committee members or whoever else, because I can say to them, 'Yeah, I've taken your class and I have students in the pond to muck around in the mud, and when we're there, we're doing this and this and this.'" And that's critical. More than saying, "I don't care that these standards are out there; I think this is important." Standards have helped teachers clarify what their goals are and also have helped justify what they do.

The other piece is that because a lot of groups came together to work on Place-based Education, it made everybody aware of each other's existence, and it got people on the periphery of educational circles to be asked to join in the center. So the conversation about education in Vermont is much richer now than it was five years ago, when there were providers that only a small group of people knew about, or only a certain fringe of people paid attention to. When the state department of education now heard about them and had worked with them, they were much more likely to be invited into the whole broad series of policy decisions that were going on. That's the most important lesson for me to learn. Regardless of the topic you've identified to work on, it's learning to position yourself so you can be a key player in the policy decision-making that goes on in the state for the next 5 to 10 to 15 years, and figuring out how it is you can position yourself to do that. I think the people I've been working with in Vermont have seen that.

So I think the other key piece to Place-based Education and making it work is two things. It is not only tying it to the standards, but also convincing people -- and yourselves perhaps -- that the kind of learning environment you want for kids is possible -- the kind of things we talked about this morning. You can, with hard work and skills, learn to take the broader conversation of education and learning and make it work so that students can still do well on the state assessments the curriculum is tied to.

Research is being done which shows that, with certain modifications, this kind of experiential, broad-based learning -- that a lot of us in this room would say is "good teaching" and "good learning," -- can lead to higher scores on state assessments. And that's the final key to think about, if our beliefs about education come true.

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