{"id":464,"date":"2019-09-23T02:17:53","date_gmt":"2019-09-23T02:17:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/ericdaigle\/?p=464"},"modified":"2019-09-25T20:29:33","modified_gmt":"2019-09-25T20:29:33","slug":"lets-put-education-in-its-place","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/ericdaigle\/2019\/09\/23\/lets-put-education-in-its-place\/","title":{"rendered":"Let’s Put Education In Its Place"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Place-based Education and the Montessori Method combine to create a new micro-school for adolescents capable of saving humanity. (12 min. read<\/em>)<\/h3>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the <\/span><\/i>place<\/span><\/i> for the first time. (T.S. Eliot)<\/span><\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Imagine you\u2019ve somehow attached hot-air balloons to your current school (yes, just like in the Pixar film UP\u2014<\/em>the only cartoon yet to make me cry!) and lifted it high into the air to move locations, depositing the entire building intact onto another section of the city you find yourself teaching in. Now I want you to ask yourself a series of simple questions: Would this make a difference to how the school functions? Would the community around you notice or care? Would your staff or students have to radically rethink what it is they do every day? If the answer is no then your school has not yet fully immersed itself in place-based education.<\/p>\n

In a 2017 paper<\/a>, associate professor Gregory A. Smith from Lewis & Clark College in the U.S., states: \u201cAt the heart of place-based education is the belief that children of any age are capable of making significant contributions to the lives of others, and that as they do so, their desire to learn and belief in their own capacity to be change agents increase. When place-based education is effectively implemented, both students and communities benefit, and their teachers often encounter a renewed sense of professional and civic satisfaction.\u201d<\/p>\n

I chanced upon the pedagogy of place-based education through the online blog, Getting Smart <\/a>\u00a0and found a multitude of resources around the subject (including this brilliant overview PDF download here<\/a>). At the time I was working for a private outdoor education high school in northern Ontario as their academic director. They were looking for strategic ways to improve community connections while at the same time taking full advantage of a unique and abundant natural locale. Place-based education was just one of many deeper learning innovations that took hold of my imagination that year, but it planted seeds in me which would eventually lead to my current position as co-founder of an adolescent Montessori school in Dundas, Ontario, called SiTE<\/a> (Situated in Transformative Environments).<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In a traditional Montessori school, the learning environment represents far more than what recent educators refer to as the Third Teacher <\/a>\u2014it is in fact the only teacher! The teacher in a Montessori setting takes a necessary step back and becomes a guide on the side, observing the spontaneous inquiry of the child within what Maria called the prepared environment. The role of the guide is to simply stay<\/em> out of the way<\/em> of the curious child, to carefully follow their lead, trace their concentrated pursuit in completing tasks called jobs (Montessori takes the concept of purposeful \u201cwork\u201d very seriously). Far from this being a free-for-all of competing self-interests, or even a more contemporary station-rotation of differing interests, what Montessori engineered\u2014as a response to over a decade of scientific observation of children\u2014are the carefully curated sensorial materials which enable learning to be an experience of freedom within limits; flowing and flowering throughout the room these children discover manipulatives in all subject areas that develop knowledge from the hand through the heart to the head. And that order is of the highest importance! If you\u2019ve ever taught children, at any age\u2014and let\u2019s face it, the same can be said of most adults\u2014you know they (we\/you!) can only ever truly learn anything by doing.<\/p>\n

Scientific observation then has established that education is not what the teacher gives; education is a natural process spontaneously carried out by the human individual, and is acquired not by listening to words but by experiences upon the environment. (Maria Montessori, <\/span>Education For A New World<\/a>)<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Anyone who has ever seen video of a Montessori class in full \u201cwork-mode\u201d is astonished both at the level of quiet concentration displayed by such active kids and the autonomous engagement each and every child gives to practical life activities. What Dr. Montessori uncovered over 100 years ago in Italy was nothing short of a hidden miracle to solve the problems of education, both then and now: the central role of the student in directing their own learning, the application of real-world contexts to achieve authentic engagement, the capability of youth to concentrate on challenging tasks well beyond their years through mixed-aged mentorship, and perhaps most vital of all, properly curated learning spaces, which cause the brain to light-up and the body to grow-up. In Italian, the word Maria used for this preparatory space was ambiente<\/em>, which is closer in meaning to the word ambience<\/em> than the English translation, environment<\/em>; also light years different from our more prosaic modern eduterm, \u201clearning space\u201d; ambiente<\/em> speaks to the aesthetic and atmospheric balance needed for a space to inspire and motivate. In Montessori, there is a place for everything and everything has its place.<\/p>\n