The Power of Community-Centered Education

Slide 3: Does Community-Centered Education Matter?

Slide 4: Department of Education knows it matters

Slide 5: What is community-centered education? • More expansive than traditional environmental education (and with less baggage) • Teaches about both the natural and the built environment • How landscape, community infrastructure, watersheds, and cultural traditions interact and shape each other

Slide 6: The Great Waste From the standpoint of the child, the great waste in the school comes from his inability to utilize the experiences he gets outside the school in any complete and free way within the school itself; while, on the other hand, he is unable to apply in daily life what he is learning at school. That is the isolation of the school—its isolation from life. John Dewey (1891)

Slide 7: Crisis in the Narrative Environment

Slide 8: Epidemic of Disengagement Lack of “narrative fit” between the stories of schooling and students’ personal lives

Slide 9: Slip out of Abstraction Community-Centered education: “the process of using the local community and environment as the starting point to teach concepts. . .” David Sobel (Place-Based Education: Connecting Classrooms & Communities)

Slide 10: Benefits of Community-Centered Teaching • Increases academic achievement • Helps students develop stronger relationships to their community • Enhances students’ appreciation for the natural world • Creates heightened sense of civic engagement • Increases citizen and parent involvement • Helps community development

Slide 11: Engaged in the real work

Slide 12: Meaning Motivates

Slide 13: Deepening by contextualizing [When] the student is in the community, researching aspects of a local watershed, conducting community health surveys, developing exhibits for the local museum, the quality of the work deepens greatly, is more carefully attended to, assumes genuine meaning. Vito Perrone: Annenberg Rural Challenge Research and Evaluation Program, 1999

Slide 14: The Habit of Science

Slide 15: Education as culture How are the understandings we seek manifest locally and regionally?

Slide 16: Learning as story

Slide 17: The adventure of research reading, taking notes, observing, experimenting, presenting

Slide 18: Community-Centered Teaching: truth in a local dialect

Slide 19: Communities of purpose

Slide 20: Linking community and scholarship

Slide 21: Accountability in the Community

Slide 22: Exhibitions of mastery and more. . .

Slide 23: The three-legged stool • Academic achievement • Social Capital • Environmental quality

Slide 24: Placemaking

Slide 25: Michael L Umphrey mlumphrey@flatheadreservation.org 406 370-4369 http://www.montanaheritageproject.org