I found a book that talks specifically about the Hawaiian culture and encouraging a culture based education that implements a Montessori education and not a place-based education. I thought that it would be important for me to continue to research what has been done in the past in regard to the improvement of public school education. This study was done specifically in Hawaii which is one of the main reasons why I chose it. I can look through this text and see what my results are and if this Montessori education encouraged a similar result. I also thought that it would be important to look into this study because they used the Montessori education which is actually pretty similar to a place-based education. Marie Montessori encouraged students to, in a way, discover and learn for themselves. She believed that students needed to have tangible resources so that they could learn through a more hands-on experience. This includes a close proximity and involvement with nature, with other students and with learning tools. This is all very similar to the place-based education. The place-based education encourages close proximity and involvement with nature and people as well, however, it also encourages involvement in community and it emphasizes how students can relate through the place that they live in. A Montessori education is more culture based and it focuses on the cultures and backgrounds of the students to create a cohesive classroom.

I grew up in the Montessori education so it does work and helps students to learn and to create a good relationships with classmates. However, it did not encourage a lot of community involvement. It created it’s own world within the classroom which is not what I prefer in the education of my future students and what I believe is the most beneficial for students.

Schonleber, Nanette S. “Hawaiian Culture-Based Education and the Montessori Approach:        Overlapping Teaching Practices, Values, and Worldview.(Report)(Author Abstract).”                  Journal of American Indian Education 50.2 (2011): 5. Print.

I dug deeper into the statistics of the Hawaiian public school education to gather more information about what students were achieving more than others and to possibly gather some hypothesis. I was able to go the the DOE (Department of Education) website of the state of Hawaii which has public records of the achievement levels of students that differentiate between female and male, ethnic background and socioeconomic background. Through this website, I was able to find that native islanders do have a significant achievement gap. In elementary school, they seem to show very little improvement throughout their time through the grades which is very important to note especially when doing the long experiment on how the new place-based curriculum improves a students scores and attitude towards school throughout their time in elementary. These will be helpful to use as comparisons when I finally have my own results. What I would like to find now though is more information on what could be leading to this achievement gap. What I could look for now is the exact curriculum that is taught in schools. I would like to try and get my hands on a TE (Teacher’s Edition) from an elementary Hawaiian classroom. The teacher’s edition is a book that mirrors the books students get for each subject. Having these TEs will help me to see exactly what is being encouraged in classrooms, but it is not always necessary to include all activities so an interview will be detrimental to the continued gathering of my research.

This last article that I found was actually rather small. It is more of an essay, but it was still an insightful piece to aid my research. It is simply called The Benefits of a Place-Based Education. It gives examples of various instances where a place-based education helped the children to apply their newly learned material to their world. They had “jobs” or tasks given to them to solve. For example, the methods for recycling or being environmentally friendly in one of the schools talked about were not very good so the students took notice and made a difference to help their school and the environment. With the place-based education, students are given opportunities to use their knowledge and to see it and feel it. With young children, it is especially important to use tangible examples; they cannot absorb abstract thought the way that adults or even teenagers can. They learn based on experience and when they can’t relate it to their own lives then their minds file it as “not important to learn” which then makes it difficult for those young students to absorb information. The methods that are used in this approach allow for students to utilize the knowledge taught in class in a real-world situation.

Another major aspect mentioned in this article is the incorporation of gardening or nature exploration. It is especially important for students so that they can see what natural science can do and things like that, but nature can also have a very calming and emotionally healing aspect to it. Introducing this to young children will not only help them to better understand sciences, but also the world around them in general physically and emotionally.

Although this article wasn’t particularly helpful in helping me discover new ways that place-education helps students achieve; it helped me to reaffirm the fact that it is beneficial. It was good to know and understand what has been learned about this method before and what has been observed to be true.

National Parks Service. The Benefits of Place-Based Education. Threats and

       Challenges.

I found a really important article about the importance of community/family involvement in the education of students especially young students. It can define the students whole academic experience and attitude towards school. The achievements of students with involved familial support are clearly visible when comparing test scores. The simple fact is that students with little familial involvement just tend to preform poorly in school. The article I found that spoke of this is called, Linking School-Family-Community Partnerships in Urban Elementary Schools to Student Achievement on State Tests. It was important for me to understand what aspects of the students education or background are beneficial to their success. Student’s achievement is not defined solely on what happens in the classroom or on teacher’s teaching techniques, the students come having had experiences that we as teachers may not have even had. Divorce, physical/emotional abuse, refugees, immigrants and maybe even parental pressures. It is important for the teacher to understand where the student is coming from to accurately teach for them. What is important to understand about family involvement though is that the lack of involvement is often not intentional or because the parents don’t care. It could be because the parents or family have work all day and doesn’t get home till late. It is also possible that the family at home does not speak English. This article talks not only about how the involvement of family is important but also how to get familial involvement. Sending home instructions for the homework in the language of the family so that they can help the student is a good start. Giving parents little tasks to do when they get home from work such as read a bed time student with their kids or review homework and give feedback. This is all important information for me to learn because I can’t just focus on the curriculum itself. Including teaching techniques such as make sure you know your students and you bring in the family themselves to be a part of the education of their student. All this builds the confidence of not only the student, but the family of the student and they put more support in to the teacher. This will, hopefully, build confidence in the students, and will therefore increase test scores at the end of the year. Right now I’m still trying to develop the curriculum and teaching methods I would like to implement in the classrooms. This article has been helping me to do that.

2003. Sheldon, Steven B. 2003. “Linking School-Family-Community Partnerships in

Urban Elementary Schools to Student Achievement on State Tests.” The    

        Urban Review35(2):149-165

(http://ezproxy.redlands.edu/docview/751988396?accountid=14729). doi:

http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.redlands.edu/10.1023/A:1023713829693.

I have been trying to build a basic curriculum for the research process itself which is why I have been trying to expand my research from simply encouraging more community involvement. Along with community involvement, a place-based education should also include a good amount of environmental submersion. Nature is very much a part of the place that children grow up and they should learn and interact with that through academic avenues. I found a great book that talks about “ecophobia”, Beyond Ecophobia: Reclaiming the Heart of Nature in Education. Although the title would have one believe that the book is about eliminating a fear of nature, the book talks a lot about how to make classroom lessons more tangible/interactive.

The basis of the text refers to the way that children are to young to understand abstract concepts. So in the classroom, when a teacher is teaching students about the weather, plant growth, forests, oceans, etc, it will be difficult for them to fully absorb the material because they cannot physically touch it or see it with their own eyes. Children in younger elementary still learn best by experience. Teaching abstract thought to this age range of students is like teaching to a wall. It, of course, isn’t impossible to teach students the different shapes of clouds or types of weather, but without the hands-on experiences, students will only learn to memorize facts.

The information I find in this book will be especially helpful in creating the very basic curriculum/ units that I would plan on introducing to a select group of classrooms for observational research. I will use this book to enhance my knowledge on various methods and ideas that will create a more interactive classroom environment and, hopefully, create a greater understanding of subject matter. Not only will this aid in the absorption and application of subject matter by students, these methods will help ELL students (English Language Learners). Because of their lack of English language skill, it can be very difficult for students to grasp concepts. Lessons with a more interactive component greatly help ELL students because they don’t necessarily need a strong English vocabulary to succeed in the lesson.

Overall, this book was a great find for me and I am looking forward to delving deeper into the information to learn more about how this can aid in my research.

Sobel, David. Beyond Ecophobia: Reclaiming the Heart in Nature Education.
Orion Society, 2013.

It found a very interesting article about the implementation of a community based program called “Service-Learning: Implications of Empathy and Community Engagement in Elementary School” by Katherine Scott and James Graham. The article recounts an experiment that the authors conducted about the benefits of incorporating service into the academic environment. I considered this as an aspect in the community/place-based education that I have slowly been mapping out, but I didn’t think that having as the focus would be beneficial. I read this article to compare my own opinion to that of a group of people that have already put together and executed an experiment about the results of a service based education. In this article, the goal was to increase community engagement, therefore increasing interest in the students which would increase the test scores. They also predicted that the students would have an increased level of empathy which would make them more tolerant and productive members of society.

The researchers gathered written consent from parents so that their children could participate in the study. The program that was introduced included a lesson about different aspect of community service and then was followed by some sort of project that related to that area of study. For example, what are some current issues that the students can help in, what are different ways that the students can help someone else out in the community? The goal is to educate about social issues while also giving the students the knowledge to help eliminate those issues within their own community. In assessing their findings, researchers gathered the demographics of each student such as age and socioeconomic status. These are gathered to better understand how the absorption of the material is taken based on students with different situations. The community engagement was pretty simply measured by word-of-mouth/interviews. The amount of empathy gained by each student was calculated by asking students questions and analyzing the responses. They also implemented the Garton & Gringart’s scale modified for each age group. They were asked to respond to certain questions posed by the researchers.

In the end, the results were that the community engagement and empathy overall, but it was only in the fifth graders that they reported a development in cognitive empathy. Cognitive empathy being the ability to feel or understand the emotions that an individual is experiencing. Personally, I conclude that this article is important for me to continue to analyze and include in my ultimate conclusion about my research topic. This is because I still believe that place-based education, the education that takes into account the place in which the students are taught and incorporating aspects of the surrounding community into the classroom to make lessons more relevant. Although there was more community engagement, it still comes back to the fact that classrooms need to be able to relate to the student. Service is important to build empathy and also motivation to help the community, but education needs to be able to relate to the students and a service-based learning environment focuses on other people.

I have been going through my articles and books that I found my initial information to see which information will help in answering my research question. I have found an interesting point of view from the book, Teaching for the Commons: Place, Pride, and the Renewal of Community. As my focus has shifted slightly from studying a teaching style purely created for this research to place-based education, I have been looking more for articles  that describe a more local approach to educating students.

In this book, written by Paul Theobald, I have found information about schools that implement a place-based education in their own classrooms. This is supposed to help the students to revitalize their eagerness to learn, but also to renew the surrounding community as it mentions in the title. Place-based learning is all about involving the whole community, to bring together the different resources that are offered and show students how they can help and apply knowledge that they learn in school to the outside world. This is not incredibly new to me however, so the most interesting aspect for me in utilizing this text is to research and study the way that the surrounding community also benefits from this kind of educational implementation. My research question is solely about the community building and academic success of the students. However, I believe that the information I could learn from this text about how a place-based education not only benefits students and the classroom community, but also the outside community, will give my work more of a persuasive tone. This is to convince schools and communities about the true worth of a place based education so that my work will not just be read, it will be analyzed and accepted, hopefully, into other communities and classrooms.

The next articles I would like to find will be more about statistics and documented information about different factors that researchers have found to help boost the test scores and academic success of elementary school students.

Citation:

Theobald, Paul. Teaching the Commons: Place, Pride, and the Renewal of Westview                       Press, 5500 Central Avenue, Boulder, CO 80301-2877., 1997. Print.

It has been quite difficult to find good research articles that have to do specifically with my research topic which is the how building a better classroom community can better benefit the self-esteem and comfort of students in school which, in extension, will result in better academic grades. Because I wasn’t finding anything that I necessarily agreed with I decided to broaden my search. In doing so, I found an article that spoke about “place-based learning”. This text was called Place Based Education: Connecting Classrooms and Communities by David Sobel. This author has written many books and articles about place-based learning so I was able to gain a lot of information from him.

I discovered that place-based learning was very similar to the teaching strategy that I had mapped out in my head. It draws on the location of the school such as country, region, suburban or urban and the socioeconomic status of the surrounding communities and by doing so creates a more community oriented classroom. The students have a more hands-on approach to learning and much of the lessons learned are applied to different events or situations that students can see locally in their community. This idea originated from the concern that students didn’t feel that what they learned in the classroom had anything to do with the “outside world”. The fact that students had separated school from the rest of their life was dangerous because then the motivation for education was declining. Place-based learning was created to show students that they can make a positive difference in their community and that they can apply what they learn to their every day lives.

At the moment, I am continuing to do more research in this teaching strategy while also trying to focus a little more on the cultural awareness aspect of the place-based education strategy. I, personally, have a hypothesis that including local culture will greatly benefit kids in school. My target research group is Hawaii, however, I have found very little on any articles about education in general, so I will continue to broaden my search.