Our Communities As Classrooms, Reclaiming The “Local” In Schools

Guest Contributor /// Nate McClennen, Vice President for Education and Innovation for Teton Science Schools

Remember field trips? Were they just a chance to unleash energy from not moving all day in the classroom or did you truly learn something enduring — that you remember until this day? My field trip experiences were memorable, but most were social and few were academic. This remains true today. The bus pulls in, students load up, and the day is spent doing something disconnected from the curriculum or covered weeks or months ago. Sure it is fun, but does it reinforce content and skills or give students ownership in making a difference in the community? We believe in a different perspective on school — where local places matter and students can make a difference. These two trends, local understanding and student ownership, are the core of the Place Schools concept — a model for rural schools in Idaho and beyond.

For the last 100+ years, the American education system has disconnected curriculum from local places. While sports, fundraisers, dinners, and performances draw the community into the school, very little learning in school supports the notion that the school curriculum itself can both cover the requisite standards and engage students in relevant, local experiences. In rural schools nationally, the uniqueness of small communities grounded in strong values, a connection to the land, and a community ethos has been largely ignored in national conversations on curriculum and instruction. Standardization has been the mantra as we try to make all schools the same, no matter the context.

Schools also are teacher-centric places where student voice is often ignored. With the advent of technology, the concept of “human-centered design” crossed the boundary between marketing departments of major companies into the curriculum of engineering and robotics courses nationwide. Human-centered design looks to innovate solutions based on real needs — articulated by real people. While students who are enrolled in these types of courses benefit, the majority are never exposed to human-centered design while in school. Yet both local connections and human-centered design can transform schools into places of engagement, higher academic outcomes, and most importantly, where students are key players in community revitalization.

At Teton Science Schools, we have spent 50 years thinking about connecting locally. First with science, and then around all subject areas. The result is a framework for education based on inquiry and design. Inquiry is about observation and questions. It is about curiosity and collecting actual data. Inquiry allows individuals to come to their own conclusions to questions that are relevant to them. Design thinking teaches students to come up with innovative solutions to real challenges. We extend human-centered design to consider community-centered design, where the needs of the entire community are considered when imagining and creating solutions that address local challenges. Our core for the concept, called “place-based education” has six characteristics:

1. Local to global context: Local learning serves as a model for understanding regional and global challenges, opportunities and connections. An understanding of self is a starting point to understanding place.
2. Learner-centered: Learning is personally relevant to students and enables student agency. The teacher serves as a guide or facilitator to learning.
3. Inquiry-based: Learning is grounded in observing, asking relevant questions, making predictions, and collecting data to understand the world through economic, ecological, and cultural lenses.
4. Design thinking: Design thinking provides a systematic approach for students to make meaningful impact in communities through the curriculum.
5. Community as classroom: Communities serve as learning ecosystems for schools where local and regional experts, experiences, and places are part of the expanded definition of a classroom.
6. Interdisciplinary approach: The curriculum matches the real world where the traditional subject area content, skills, and dispositions are taught through an integrated and frequently project-based approach where all learners are accountable and challenged.

So with this in mind, imagine a school with the following characteristics:

• A curriculum that uses the community as the classroom relying on local knowledge, places, and talent to engage and enhance and eventually connect to more national and global topics.
• Students who inquire into questions in and around the community that are relevant, create predictions, collect data, and make conclusions that they can verify.
• Students whose projects are interwoven in the very fabric of a community, supporting innovation through student generated design solutions to enhance local places.
• High expectations for every student with learning approaches based on the best available research in cognition.
• A belief in and curriculum about teaching leadership to all students.
• Learning and advancement based on mastery of content rather than time spent in a classroom.
• Real-time monitoring of student progress from anywhere that is web-accessible.
• Students who value a deep commitment to the long term viability and innovation in their communities — who see the potential to return even if they leave for post-graduation college, armed forces, or technical training.
• Excellent local teachers who facilitate learning experiences within the community and guide students towards mastery of critical core content in literacy, mathematics, and technology — as well as other subject areas.
• Access to remote teachers with specific areas of content expertise to provide outside perspective and support on assessment, curriculum design, and instruction.

Over the next three years, with support from the J.A. and Kathryn Albertson Family Foundation and in partnership with rural schools around the state of Idaho, we will work to design a complementary new vision for learning in rural areas called the Place Schools Model.

We would love to hear your thoughts. What would you add to this vision? What do you like about this vision? Have you already seen your local schools doing work in this area? Have more questions? Send us an email at nate.mcclennen@tetonscience.org. We would love to hear your ideas about how to put the place back into schools in a way that increases engagement, increases learning, and increases impact on the local community.

Nate McClennen is Vice President for Education and Innovation for Teton Science Schools, which inspires curiosity, engagement, and leadership through transformative place-based education on four campuses in Idaho and Wyoming. He has been a classroom teacher and school leader for over twenty years.