Knowing Home: The Growth of Place-based Education
© Marina Schauffler
This article was published in the Fall 1999 edition of Chewonki's Wild Gulf Journal
On a fog-drenched morning in late May, an assortment of cars pull into Moose Point State Park along the upper reaches of Penobscot Bay. People surface wearing a rainbow spectrum of slickers, fringed with Bean boots and Wellingtons. Undeterred by steady rain, they tromp down the shore to where a spring tide has unveiled the lowest reaches of the intertidal zone. Marine biologist Diane Cowan begins describing the bewildering array of creatures that live in this dynamic habitat. Soon she is fielding a barrage of questions as the students (ranging in age from 30s to 70s) look into tidepools and under rocks – inquiring about the life habits, names and niches of dozens of plants and animals.
A few people take copious if sodden notes, although no one will test them on these details. They are here simply to learn more about their natural community and the issues it faces. Through 80 hours spent in the classroom and field, these residents of the Penobscot Bay region gain a sense for the area’s maritime history, marine ecology, geology, fisheries, land uses, water quality, and culture. In turn, each participant commits to provide at least 30 hours of community service giving back to the Bay.
This marine volunteer program is one of many recent initiatives designed to help people renew their connections with home ground. In a transient culture, where the average citizen moves 14 times in a lifetime, people can become detached from the land – losing touch with the natural and cultural qualities that make a place unique. Writer W.S. Merwin observes that many of us now live less in places than in situations.
This displacement is compounded by our intellectual inheritance: a Cartesian legacy that divides the world along dualistic lines, severing humans and nature. When we speak of the natural communities in which we live, we tend to use words such as scenery, landscape, environment, and setting – terms suggesting that we are spectators or manipulators of place more than inhabitants. We lack language that conveys a sense of participating materially and spiritually in the life of a place.
This absence reflects a moral, as well as physical, estrangement from the land. In the foreword to his 1948 essay collection, A Sand County Almanac, conservationist Aldo Leopold wrote: “We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.” Leopold suggests that an ethic of ecological care comes from participating creatively and responsibly in a place – learning its ways and fitting oneself within them. People need to understand the land in all its dimensions: geology, weather, climate, seasonal changes, tidal and lunar cycles, native plants and wildlife, indigenous cultures, settlement patterns, economic trends, patterns of resource use, and cultural stories. In this way, place becomes both library and laboratory, educator David Orr observes: people learn to “read” the land and to cultivate new ways of life that mesh harmoniously with the larger natural community.
By engaging in careful observation, research and reflection, people can reach an understanding of home that surpasses technical knowledge. They may cultivate a deep kinship – a sense of belonging sufficiently strong to reshape vision and identity. “The land can speak us back to ourselves” both spiritually and physically, observes poet Deborah Tall, author of From Where We Stand: Recovering a Sense of Place. By reminding us that we are bound to a greater whole, it can extend the reach of our perception and compassion. This potential, while not always realized in practice, is inspiring educators to create programs and activities that nourish stronger ties to the land.
Place-based educational programs are taking hold throughout the Gulf of Maine region, sponsored by schools, governmental agencies and local and regional groups. This article examines some of these activities around Maine’s largest embayment. Penobscot Bay has traditionally supported active fisheries and moderate tourism, being a favored cruising ground of yachters. Today its economy and ecology are in flux, with the decline in fisheries, the expansion of tourism, an influx of retirees, and an increase in corporate enterprises (like the credit card corporation MBNA, which now has three office complexes around Penobscot Bay). With changing perceptions and patterns of resource use, there is an opportunity for place-based educational programs to focus attention on the needs and values of the Bay. While many of these efforts are in their infancy, they offer an interesting array of approaches that could become models for other regions within the Gulf.
Testing Local Waters
Adolescents outnumber adults in the Partners in Monitoring group that gathers at Camden-Rockport High School, collecting equipment to test water quality. The next few hours of this sultry July afternoon will be spent sampling fresh- and saltwater sites, assessing levels of fecal coliform, dissolved oxygen, pH, temperature and salinity.
Along the length of Maine’s coast, there are 21 other Partners in Monitoring groups in which community members and high school students collaborate on water testing. Almost all these groups are run by local land trusts or conservation commissions. Camden’s program is unusual in that students manage all the sampling and lab testing. The two adults who help coordinate this effort are quick to note that they are not leaders or advisors in this context, although both teach science at the high school. Sue Klemmer and Rob Lovell stress that while monitors use the school’s laboratory facilities, the Camden program is neither a class nor an established extracurricular club. It’s independent of the school because “that’s the way students wanted it,” Lovell explains: “they want it to belong to them.” Because monitoring results are used by the town and state, it’s critical that all field and lab work be done to a high standard. The best way to ensure that, students have found, is to limit participation to those who really want to be there.
Students who make that commitment derive satisfaction from knowing that they provide an essential service to their local community. When an underground holding tank released raw sewage into nearby Megunticook Lake in August 1998, local code enforcement officer Jeff Nims immediately sought help from the Partners in Monitoring group. They tested numerous points along the lake’s outflow until fecal coliform counts subsided and Nims was able to lift temporary bans on drinking and swimming. “It was fantastic to have the team out there doing that kind of testing so exhaustively and so quickly,” Nims told a Camden Herald reporter; “they are a great resource and I am grateful for their assistance.”
While the monitoring program can help in such unforeseen events, its primary purpose is to create a solid base of information on area water quality: ten points of data for ten years. Student monitors have to take a long-term view, recognizing that the fruits of their labor won’t be evident for a decade or more. Then their data will allow the community to spot environmental changes and distinguish human influences from natural variation. Sue Klemmer’s motivation for supporting the effort, volunteering long hours on top of her teaching load, is personal as well as professional. She grew up in a town where wells were contaminated by toxic chemicals. Because the town lacked baseline data, it spent two decades in court fighting for remediation. Klemmer now sees water-testing work as an essential community service.
For students, too, the value of field-based science is enhanced through community service (what is often called “service learning”). Groups like the KIDS (Kids Doing Service) Consortium have documented the importance of engaging students in researching and resolving real-world issues, bridging the gap between classroom and community. Doing community-based science can foster leadership skills and enliven the learning process by helping students put theory into practice. Senior Casey Koons, who has been a Camden monitor for five years, says – only half in jest – that only by doing water testing did he grasp “what I’ve been doing [in science class] since seventh grade!”
What may be less apparent is the effect the monitoring program has on students’ sense of place. For six months each year, they return bi-weekly to sampling sites – noting weather conditions, wildlife and other qualitative observations, alongside quantitative measurements. This consistent practice of observation seems to enhance Casey’s appreciation for place: he shows none of the apathy and cynicism that reportedly characterizes his generation. Carrying a bulky blue box of monitoring equipment down to Camden Harbor, he confesses that few friends share his enthusiasm for water-quality testing. “Most of them can’t wait to get out of here,” Casey says, glancing up at the quaint village set against wooded hills. In contrast, he relishes living in what he calls “a REALLY beautiful place!” He attributes his enthusiasm for coastal stewardship to an extracurricular marine biology class he took in 5th grade. “It helped getting me young,” he believes.
Learning from the Land
On Vinalhaven, the largest year-round island community in Penobscot Bay, the local land trust works hard to give school children that sort of early exposure to natural ecosystems. Each year Lucy McCarthy, who directs the Vinalhaven Land Trust, helps organize a series of roughly 20 “Nature-based Field Days” for all the students at Vinalhaven’s single community school. With funding from a private donor, McCarthy brings in visiting educators and scientists who introduce children to the wonders and complexities of the island’s forests, wetlands, vernal pools, geology and wildlife. Most of the field days occur on land trust preserves so that students visit sites to which they can return.
The Field Day program, which began in 1994, has become a vital part of the curriculum. McCarthy overcame initial skepticism among teachers by catering the outdoor programs to their curricular needs. Each year, she approaches science teachers asking what areas they plan to concentrate on and whether they’d like a complementary class outdoors. Last fall, not a single teacher turned her down. McCarthy took that response as evidence that the “hands-on science programs really are accepted.”
The intent of the field trips is not to indoctrinate students but to expose them to settings from which they will learn. Recently, for example, a high school class visited a wetland degraded by ATV tracks and engaged in a thoughtful discussion of where recreational vehicle use is appropriate. Ideally, the place itself becomes teacher. While it’s hard to gauge the impact of such programs by quantitative measures, McCarthy is optimistic: “We just have to hope,” she says, “[that] the beautiful places speak for themselves.”
Just up the Bay, on the island of Islesboro, the local land trust runs a successful summer day camp for children and guided natural history walks for adults. Alongside these traditional offerings, Islesboro Islands Trust has created an innovative program to demonstrate how healthy ecosystems can nourish both the economy and the land. Trust Director Steve Miller helped launch (and initially teach) a horticultural class for high school juniors and seniors in which students manage two four-season greenhouses, growing a wide variety of organic vegetables. The first greenhouse was built as a class project by an adult vocational class, with guidance and support from Eliot Coleman, a gardener in nearby Harborside who has pioneered techniques of four-season growing in cold climates.
Students at Islesboro Central School now eat from the greenhouse through much of the school year and last spring sold 500 seedlings to island families, making it easier for them to grow gardens. A student gardener maintains the enterprise during summer months, selling greens (to help pay wages) and starting seedlings for the fall. Miller attributes the success of this effort to a long-standing collaboration between the land trust and school, whose teachers tend to be “environmentally engaged.” Being in a small community has helped forge that constructive relationship, he admits, but he believes such cooperation is possible anywhere that people sit down and talk together. Like McCarthy, he recommends that community members ask teachers what they’d like to do in the way of place-based education, and then help them realize that vision.
The Poetry of Place
On North Haven, another year-round island community, teachers at all grade levels are committed to getting students outdoors -- experiencing habitats on the island and around Maine. English teacher Janis Jones explains that with support from their principal “experiential education is becoming a part of the curriculum,” integrated into all disciplines. The school’s small size (roughly 80 students K-12) allows for unusual travel opportunities: in recent years, classes have hiked Mt. Katahdin, canoed the St. Croix River, and spent time studying clearcuts near Bigelow Mountain. Experiences on these trips become raw material for writing exercises, as Jones has students draft personal essays and poems based on their time in the field. She invites them to “to allow poets to be their tutors,” encouraging them to read nature writers like Henry David Thoreau, Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry and Mary Oliver.
Last winter, Jones learned from Island Institute staff about an international “environmental poetry and art contest” called “River of Words” (ROW) just six weeks before submissions were due. Sponsored by the International Rivers Network and the Center for the Book at the Library of Congress, the ROW contest encourages students to write imaginatively about their “ecological addresses,” depicting the qualities of their home watersheds. The ROW philosophy – marrying art and science, and fostering a sensory attention to place – reinforced what Jones had already been doing. Despite the time constraints, she encouraged her students to enter the contest.
The small packet of poems sent from the North Haven Community School joined more than 6,000 entries from young artists (aged 5-19) around the world. When former Poet Laureate Robert Hass judged the submissions, he selected 8 grand-prize winners in art and poetry and 36 poetry finalists. Among the select crew of finalists were two of Jones’ students from North Haven: 17-year-old Liza Waterman and 14-year-old Jacqueline Curtis.
Jacqueline’s poem describes her experience at North Haven’s Fresh Pond, the island’s sole water source, while Liza’s recounts her experience on a school trip to the St. Croix River (see sidebar). Sitting in the science lab on a bright July morning, the two students reflect on how – in Eudora Welty’s words – “place induces poetry.” Both young women began writing poetry in the middle school, with the encouragement of their teacher Janis Jones. Their poems grew from their experiences on the island -- lobstering with their fathers, fishing and swimming, canoeing and kayaking, being outdoors day and night. North Haven is a community that values the arts, they note, and that emphasis is reflected in the school. “Being involved in the arts gives you a stronger feeling for the environment,” Liza observes.
When asked why two students from a tiny school would place in such a competitive contest, they offer similar responses. “There’s a lot of one-on-one” between teachers and students here, Liza explains, and tremendous emphasis on the arts. Jacqueline concurs, saying that the supportive atmosphere at the school allows “anyone to ask questions” and take risks. Without that backing, she says, she might never have had the courage to enter the contest.
The attention and support they receive in school is counter-balanced by the limits of island life: it can be confining at times, they say, particularly as adolescents. Both are eager to see more of the world and gain some experience of mainland living. Asked if they’d ever return to live on North Haven, though, they stand in perfect agreement. Liza’s unequivocal response speaks volumes of her bond with place: “definitely, DEFINITELY I want to come back here.”
Jones is continually amazed by how clear her students are on their values. They do remarkably well, she says, when asked to describe “what matters to you in your life.”
Part of that clarity, she speculates, comes from the “gift of being limited in what you can do” – removed from much of pop culture and immersed in the cycles and rhythms of a particular place. When she gave a quiz from the ROW Teacher’s Guide testing students’ knowledge of their ecological address, “these kids knew the answers. It’s something they know innately,” Jones says. That was not true where she last taught in Texas. There kids knew which mall to shop at and which interstate exits led where but they knew virtually nothing about the natural world about them. In contrast, North Haven students seem to have discovered the truth in Gary Snyder’s words: “to write full-heartedly from the vantage point of a well-known and loved territory is a vitally redemptive act.”
Tending to Place
For some Bay residents, redemption comes from living close to the land -- drawing one’s sustenance from it. That principle governed the lives of Helen and Scott Nearing, a couple whose writings on simple and purposeful living have inspired countless homesteaders, gardeners and activists. The Nearings built a stone home on the shores on Penobscot Bay, ate from their gardens and kept warm with wood. Visitors who read their books often came to see first-hand how they went about “living the good life.”
That pattern of informal education has continued after their deaths, thanks to the Nearings’ foresight and the dedication of countless volunteers. Their former home in Harborside now houses the “Good Life Center,” a nonprofit organization dedicated to perpetuating the Nearings philosophy, particularly “conscientious and thoughtful living in harmony with nature.” Roughly 1,500 visitors a year find their way to this remote property, halfway down Cape Rosier. There they talk with two resident stewards who maintain the gardens and meet with visitors.
The current stewards, Jennifer Jones and Jake Kennedy, are in their second and final year of a position designed to be a short-term apprenticing opportunity. Stewards must adhere to many of the principles that governed the Nearings’ lives: gardening organically with no animal fertilizers, being vegetarian, and refraining from use of alcohol or tobacco. When Jones first learned of the steward’s job, she had never heard of the Nearings but quickly found she shared “a lot of ideas and ideals” with them. Jones enjoys living in their home and leaving a minimal ecological footprint on the land by growing wholesome food and not driving. She and Kennedy ate almost exclusively from their garden last year, buying only bulk grains and beans and tomato sauce (having had a bad tomato year).
While they live lightly on the land, far from any urban center, they are not exempt from the ecological challenges facing more developed areas. Jones and Kennedy recently learned that the cove across the road, where they routinely swim and harvest rockweed for fertilizer, contains dangerously high levels of heavy metals (due to a former copper mine located nearby). This disturbing discovery reinforces a need that the Nearings themselves articulated – that ‘bread labor’ done on the land must be complemented by work with fellow citizens on communal issues. Patty Ryan, who serves on the Center’s Board of Directors, says the Nearings lived by the motto “Do the best you can in the place that you are – and be kind.” The Good Life Center seeks to embody that vision of compassionate community change by being, in Ryan’s words “a source of inspiration and outreach for environmental and political activism” in the region.
Inspiration, outreach and community service lie at the heart of another volunteer effort in the vicinity, the Penobscot Bay Marine Volunteer Program. More than 60 alumni have now gone through its intensive training, wading through tidepools, surveying shoreline erosion, and visiting wastewater treatment plants and aquaculture sites. Their experience in the field – getting wet, windblown and muddy - seems to reinforce their commitment to give something back to the Bay. Nancy Galland, a member of the first class of volunteers in 1995, found the 80-hour, field-based training “incredibly valuable” – a sentiment echoed by other graduates. Most of the field trips and classroom talks are led by experts in the field: scientists, policy makers, planners, and business people who hold markedly different perspectives on the bay. Students who see the Bay through these varied angles come away with a far better understanding of the whole.
With that widened perspective can come a greater commitment to place. Galland was struck, during her training in 1995, by how little baseline scientific research had been done on Penobscot Bay (a situation finally being remedied in recent years). On completing the training, she spent her 30 hours of community service helping the Department of Marine Resources update their septic system records. Her attention then turned to toxics issues, following a mercury spill in the Penobscot River at the Holtra-Chem manufacturing facility. Because she’d gone through the volunteer training, Galland recalls, “the alarms went off a lot louder” than they might otherwise have done because she understood more about the spill’s effects.
Galland and her husband Richard Steneck, another Penobscot Bay Marine Volunteer, live at the head of the Bay where much of the industrial load carried by the Penobscot River settles. Dismayed by this realization, they mobilized a successful effort to get stricter regulatory controls on Holtra-Chem, a major industrial polluter. They also began teaching a session on toxics and citizen empowerment in subsequent volunteer trainings. Galland notes that while the training itself is not political, it heightened her effectiveness as a local activist -- giving her new information and “channels of communication” to decision-makers. Getting out in the field and learning more about the region, she says, “helped us get more grounded in our commitment to the Bay.”
Participating in Place
That link – between experience and commitment – lies at the heart of place-based education. What unites this diverse array of programs – from water-quality monitoring and organic gardening to creative writing and community organizing – is a commitment to join intellect, feeling and action. Too often, environmental education emphasizes knowledge while neglecting kinship. Affective bonds are viewed with suspicion by those who adhere to the tenets of scientific rationalism. Yet no less a scientist than Rachel Carson observed that “it is not half so important to know as to feel. If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow.” Place-based education nourishes seeds and soil, engaging both mind and heart.
If we apprentice ourselves to the land – attending carefully to its cycles and complexities, it may imprint on us, becoming part of who we are. Conscious immersion in a place offers us stories and symbols that can shape identity and character. We may see in our surroundings, as Jacqueline Curtis observes (see sidebar poem), a reflection of our inmost selves.
This recognition can change – irrevocably – our relation to the land, allowing us to move beyond the traditional separation of humans and nature. Rather than being exploiters of ‘the environment’ -- or even managers and stewards (terms that still suggest remote control), we may become participants in place. We can enter into what writer Richard K. Nelson calls “a covenant of mutual regard and responsibility” with place, recognizing that “we share in a common nurturing.” Community, in this sense, is more than a physical setting or social unit; it is a state of being that honors the entire ecological web.
The roots of ecology trace back to the Greek word, oikos, meaning ‘household’ or ‘home.’ Place-based education values these roots, recognizing that our greatest contribution to the larger natural whole may be made in our own backyards. “The world needs our dedication,” poet Deborah Tall observes, “not just in the abstract global sense, but in local loyalties.” By committing ourselves to home ground, we may learn to live responsibly in place.
