Teach Local: The importance of place based education in a climate crisis context.

The ocean has been my life long companion and has played a key role in shaping and enhancing my education. Like most kids, the most impactful parts of my early education started long before I entered school. I grew up in a small, close knit community on the coast of Maine. Some of the first things I learned about were the creatures that inhabited the rough, rocky beach across the street from my house. During the warm months I spent every moment that I could at the beach, and became very closely acquainted with the landscape and creatures that lived there. I would exhaust myself for hours building elaborate homes for hermit crabs and running around with seaweed trailing behind me until I would finally settle down in front of a tide pool and sit for hours, humming to periwinkles. Having the freedom to go outside at all times and explore the beach empowered me. 

When I entered school, the ocean became a tool for enhancing our otherwise regulated public school lessons. I went to a public regional elementary school, so between standardized tests and common core requirements, we would go down to the town beach and collect sea stars and shells for our aquarium, learn the difference between seaweed types and identify invasive crab species. The trips down to the beach made school feel special, I think I knew that other kids didn’t get to go to the beach on Tuesday afternoon, and it filled me with pride. A couple times a year we went out on one of our classmates’ parents’ lobster boats to learn about the industry that keeps our small town alive. This place based learning approach provided a certain reverence for the resource that provides a livelihood for a large percentage of our community. 

Place based education connected me to my community and grew my understanding of my positionality in the world, it opened my eyes to how climate change affected the people around me and made me care about the solution. The education I got growing up profoundly shaped what I think is important today, that is why I believe that place based education should be integral in every child’s education. 

I see now, which I did not see before, that living in a coastal community is not always romantic, and while growing up there was idyllic in some ways, I also witnessed the effects of extreme environmental change on our shores. I bore witness to the consequences of overfishing when we stopped being able to buy Maine shrimp at the fish CO-OP, seasonal poverty plagued our community when the lobster season was slow, and people worked extremely hard all summer only to go broke in the winter. Tourism seemed to grow every year, and with that more problems arose from pollution in the ocean as new houses were being built too close to water without proper zoning and regulation. 

Though it might seem as though this type of teaching is only possible in rural communities that is untrue. It is perhaps even more important for place based education to be incorporated into city schools. Being taught about the real environment issues within your city and community is empowering and important. Education like this could lead to more students coming back to their communities and being leaders. 

Whether you live in Maine or New York City, there are real environmental problems occurring in every neighborhood and community across the nation, the more that students can leave the classroom and learn about the physical place that is their home, the better. Real change stems from local movements, comprehending something as complex and huge as global climate change is difficult unless it is localized and made personal. Though I benefited from some of this place based learning in elementary school, it completely vanished as I got older. I think it would be beneficial for highschools and universities to integrate this approach more as well, not just for natural science majors, but for history, literature and art classes as well. If we expect students to engage in their local communities, if we complain about young people’s apathy towards politics and low voter turnout, it is because the education system has failed to provide avenues for engagement. If place based education became the new normal, it would build resilient and caring communities that think in a more collective manner about the issues that affect all of us, instead of individuals looking out for themselves. 

Written by Celia Hurvitt