Overview
This is a selectively curated annotated bibliography of readings related to environmental education and place-based or place-conscious approaches to education. Works are selected based on their utility for classroom instructors. With these readings, writing instructors at all levels can further their understanding of the goals of place-conscious education, develop their own theories of what place-conscious and environmental education mean, and find inspiration for assignments, projects, activities, topics, and readings to use in writing classrooms.
Annotated Bibliography
Brooke, Robert. Place-Conscious Education and the Teaching of Writing.
Quick Look
This collection of essays, a foundational text in exploring the role of place-conscious approaches to writing instruction, provides various perspectives on how writing instructors have fostered active learning, local knowledge, and civic participation in rural settings.
Who Can Use This Book?
Writing teachers and instructors at all levels (early childhood, middle grades, secondary, and post-secondary) who want to understand what place-based and place-conscious education are and how to implement place-conscious principles into their writing instruction.
Christensen, Laird, and Hal Crimmel (eds.). Teaching About Place.
Quick Look
This collection of essays by educators, environmental scholars, and education theorists explores methods, experiences, and justifications for teaching about the places in which we learn. Essays include overview of place-oriented course designs and assignments, personal narratives about experiences teaching about place, and challenges educators face when using place-oriented approaches.
Who Can Use This Book?
Instructors at all levels (early childhood, middle grades, secondary, and post-secondary) who want to read about others’ experiences teaching about place and using place-based pedagogies in various educational settings. This book also provides some ideas for assignments and scaffolding activities.
Dobrin, Sidney, and Christian Weisser. Natural Discourse: Toward Ecocomposition.
Quick Look
This book is the theoretical foundation for the ecocomposition movement and other contemporary environmentally-oriented writing movements in composition. Dobrin and Weisser develop the concept of “ecocompostion” and begin to explore how it might be implemented in college writing classrooms.
Who Can Use This Book?
Instructors of FYC or FYW who want to incorporate environmental education or attention to connections between environment and discourse into their writing courses.
Donehower, Kim, Charlotte Hogg, and Eileen E. Schell. Rural Literacies.
Quick Look
This book explores how writers in rural context develop various literacies and explores alternative models of education in rural contexts which encourage citizenship, critical engagement with stereotypes, and ways of living and learning in rural contexts in a globalized world.
Who Can Use This Book?
Instructors teaching in rural settings who want to understand how their students develop and use literacies and who want to explore alternative models of education which celebrate the local experience of rural communities.
Gruenewald, David, and Gregory Smith (eds.). Place-Based Education in the Global Age: Local Diversity.
Quick Look
This collection of essays edited by place-based educators David Gruenewald and Gregory Smith explores various models of place-based education and situates place-based initiatives in a broader context of contemporary technology and global culture.
Who Can Use This Book?
Instructors who want to make connections between the local and the global in their classrooms and who want to see how other educators are doing it.
Keller, Christian, and Christian Weisser. The Locations of Composition.
Khan, Richard. Critical Pedagogy, Ecoliteracy, and Planetary Crisis.
Quick Look
This theoretical work lays out Khan’s concept of a critical ecoliteracy as he explains how critical pedagogy (Friere, Giroux, Marcuse) can give environmental educators a pedagogical praxis through which to work toward environmental justice via classroom learning.
Who Can Use This Book?
Anyone who wants to understand why an environmentalist ethic might have a place in classroom learning and how they might begin to develop a theoretically robust standpoint from which to create environmental and place-conscious classroom materials.
McComiskey, Bruce, and Cynthia Ryan. City Comp: Identities, Spaces, Practices.
Rice, Jeff. Digital Detroit: Rhetoric and Space in the Age of the Network.
Who Can Use This Book?
College writing instructors interested in understanding the connection between computer-mediated, networked writing, rhetoric, and perceptions of space and place. This book will help instructors understand how digital media impacts our understandings of and relationships to places, and it can provide some ideas for how to design digital media-based activities for a place-conscious classroom.
Sobel, David. Place-Based Education: Connecting Classrooms and Communities.
Quick Look
This foundational book by place-based educator David Sobel explains some of the central aims of place-based education. Sobel also explores the philosophical and political roots of place-based education, tracing its lineage back to the American Pragmatists and Deweyan Progressivism. Finally, Sobel explores some place-based initiatives working in elementary education.
Who Can Use This Book?
Anyone looking to get a quick overview of what place-based education is all about. This book is focused on K-12 education, but it provides historical and philosophical origins of place-based education and discusses possible benefits of the project.