Teresa Farrell and I share a large office at VIU with our colleagues Mary Ann and Deirdre. I hope nobody ever offers me a chance to have an office to myself, as room 270 is a place where some pretty cool ideas percolate and take shape. This fall, as we teach our classes online, I miss that time with my colleagues in 270, and I miss taking our teacher education students on field trips that we hope will build what Bereiter (2014) calls principled practical knowledge (or the know how + know why) of place-based education.
Our colleagues at the VIU Faculty of Education have been doing place-based and land-based education in many ways since before I joined the faculty in 2016. My first introduction to my colleagues and some future students came in the fall of 2015, when I tagged along with my small daughter for an interdisciplinary place-based field trip to Neck Point Park in Nanaimo. It was blustery day and my 3 year-old I weren’t dressed warmly enough, but we watched – transfixed – as Teresa pulled local history and performing arts together into an activity that had students and my daughter acting as fish and nets on a bluff overlooking Shack Island. I was happy to get involved in that annual day in subsequent years, when we situated the work in downtown Nanaimo and invited our students to see that place with their heritage, urban planning, sociologist, scientist, and artist hats on.
Our two most ambitious trips so far had us take large groups of students to the Fraser Canyon in 2018 and 2019. This Canyon is one of Teresa’s favourite places in the province. It was a place I hardly remembered from childhood until my old university friend Mike McDonald – famous (infamous?) among anyone who knows him as an epic Fraser Canyon enthusiast – began inviting me on what I call history nerd junkets to the region. He had been involved in the establishment of the New Pathways to Gold Society, which ” supports economic development through heritage tourism, First Nations reconciliation, community projects and heritage events in the historic Hope-Bakerville/Gold Rush Trails Corridor of British Columbia.” I came home from a NPTGS trip* with Mike, historian Dr. Daniel Marshall, and others to Lytton in April 2018, and rushed into 270 on a Monday morning to tell Teresa all about it. Within minutes we had decided that we needed to take our students to experience this incomparable place – a place where geography and history intersect in so many dramatic ways that place is “in your face”. Dan Marshall helped us to design our first itinerary, the New Pathways to Gold Society and our faculty provided base trip funding, and so in September that year we found ourselves on an early morning ferry with 35 students and a rich itinerary for three days.
We are launching this blog to share the work we have been doing in place-based education over the last couple of years and continue to try to do in our online courses. We will be sharing assignments, the work of some of our students, videos and images of our field trips, and our publications. Look for future posts sharing more about the 2018 and 2019 trips and a soon-to-be published paper about our research findings from the 2019 trip.
We will also invite colleagues, alumni and students to share their place-based education work. Please reach out with any questions, comments, or ideas for our future trip.
Paula Waatainen
*Read about that powerful April 2018 trip in the Vancouver Sun
Read Mike McDonald’s review of Dr. Daniel Marshall’s award winning book: