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.