Project Investigator(s): Iris Berger, Assistant Professor of Teaching; Melanie Wong, Assistant Professor of Teaching and Heather Androsoff, Faculty Advisor; Language and Literacy Education, Faculty of Education
Project Description
Place-based learning is foundational for the study of all subjects as it provokes students to immerse themselves in and respond to the local community, its cultures, heritage, landscapes, and issues. The proposed study investigates the impact of incorporating place-based pedagogies into five courses is the B.Ed. program’s Primary Cohort. Over the course of a school year, teacher candidates will be invited to critically and experientially engage with the notion of place through a series of workshops, outdoor explorations, and additional resources. Innovative digital technologies, such as community mapping, will be used to document and capture students’ thinking and learning.
Research Questions
1) What is the impact of place-based experiential learning on teacher candidates’ teaching practices?
2) In what ways has the community mapping process, enhanced or not, the knowledge of and relation to place; and enriched teacher candidates’ teaching practices?
Impact on teaching and learning at UBC
The project has the potential to make significant long-term practical contributions to the B.Ed. program and to teaching and learning within B.C. public school system. Since the inquiry and literacy courses in which this project is embedded are part of all the B.Ed. cohorts’ program of study, this project acts as a pilot that, if successful, can be incorporated into additional B.Ed. cohorts making place-based education relevant across subjects, grade-level, and disciplines. As the project aims at modeling ethical and practical place-based pedagogies to pre-service teachers, participants can bring what they learned into their context as future teachers. By experimenting with the community mapping tool, teacher candidates gain practical skills that they can
use with their own students to co-create situated, place-stories and to support emplaced meaning making.