Content area
Full Text
School education orten directs students' attention away from their own lived experiences toward knowledge developed in other places by people they will likely never meet (Smith 2002). Students in traditional science courses commonly learn írom reading texts, listening to lectures, and completing worksheets rather than direct encounters with the world around them. Place-based education, by contrast, acknowledges that ior many students, "valuable knowledge... is knowledge that is directly related to their own social reality, knowledge that will allow them to engage in activities that are of service to and valued by those they love and respect" (Smith 2002). Placebased education iosters understanding of one's surrounding landscapes, environments, and communities; it engages learnerbased, inquiry-oriented, interdisciplinary approaches to explore the ecological, cultural, and economic perspectives of a community (Deloria Jr. and Wildcat 2001).
In the past several years, teachers at my school have been working to incorporate into our teaching human impacts on the environment and relevant environmental justice issues. Place-based education, which is rooted in historic and Indigenous educational practices, strongly supports environmental stewardship (Cajete 2000). During my chemistry teaching, I increase student engagement by helping students see connections between the analytical problem solving supported by a typical school chemistry curriculum and their own lives, iamilies, and cultures. Water is an efiective anchor topic to connect cross-disciplinary academic learning with real-world experiences (Endreny 2010; Santelmann et al. 2011). My students and their iamilies have many memorable experiences with water that I lelt would connect well to this science unit. In this article, I describe the place-based educational experiences I supported for my students in their studies of water in chemistry. Student learning goals tor this unit included
* recognizing the role that water plays in their everyday lives, individually and communally;
* connecting the science of water learned in school to their personal experiences of water, as well as iamily and cultural sources of knowledge about water;
* identiiying community issues and concerns about water; and
* identiiying ways they can use their knowledge to work tor change.
Instructional and community context
The iollowing activities added nearly two weeks to the beginning of my traditional water unit and a lew extra days scattered throughout the unit ior research and/or experiments related to students' chosen topics. The...