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This qualitative case study provides a detailed description of the ways a Kindergarten/Grade 1 teacher in a Gulf Islands school, located on Canada’s west coast, integrated place-based education in her practice with young learners. The teacher’s integration of place-based knowledge over a school year, and her incorporation of traditional knowledge linked to local Coast Salish ways of knowing, was in response to the British Columbia Ministry of Education’s mandate to include local Indigenous ways of knowing in all classrooms. This study also reveals the ways an Indigenous educator affiliated with the school district and local community members provided the teacher and students with deeper understandings of Salt Spring Island from a historical, place-based, and Indigenous knowledge perspective. Specifically, the Indigenous educator and community members shared their knowledge on the vegetation on the island and shared information about the animals that lived on or near the island. Throughout the study, the teacher drew on a “critical pedagogy of place,” which focuses on the ecological aspects of place and the tenets of critical pedagogy. This study documented the ways the teacher included local Indigenous knowledge in her practice in culturally relevant and appropriate ways – primarily through outdoor learning experiences. The children also shared their perspectives on these learning experiences. In this study, the place-based learning opportunities provided to the children enabled them to acquire rich insight on the history and ecology of their community and island.

This chapter introduces the history and development of inquiry-based learning (IBL) and describes how teaching and learning strategies over several decades in P-12 and higher education have built upon the ideas of John Dewey. Though personal reflection, uncertain learning paths and outcomes, and mindful inquiry have been central foundations undergirding IBL, the approach now stands upon the shoulders of theoretical and research giants such as Piaget, Vygotsky, and Bruner. Over 100 years, modern IBL proponents like Gruenewald, have implemented and experimented, contributing to cognitive and social science pedagogy, for instance, by attempting to make contemporary teaching and learning relevant, thoughtful, and action-oriented.

Dewey’s work continues to dominate educational landscapes and inquiry-based approaches to teaching and learning have, in contemporary forms, withstood the test of time. Two case studies in this chapter illustrate how IBL has materialized as problem-based and place-based methodology, reflecting influences of social and cognitive constructivism, humanistic psychology, and eco-feminism. Those who embrace IBL continue to improve teaching and learning strategies in order to find more effective methods of immersing themselves and their students in globally critical conversations about essential life issues – inside and outside of classrooms – a central and enduring tenet of Dewey’s experiential learning.

Service learning is a pedagogical approach that primarily focuses upon achieving student learning outcomes through meaningful community engagement. While service-learning pedagogies provide “service” to community, the view of community partners from a deficit-oriented perspective can render service learning ineffective and, at worst, potentially harmful to the community served. This chapter presents a course that uses food as a civic lens through which to engage community, instructors, and students in CRITICAL-SERVICE-LEARNING where systemic inequities that contribute to community needs are focused upon, community partners are co-creators of course design, outcomes to student learning and community benefits are equitably considered, and collective knowledge and experience of stakeholders is valued.

To provide insight into young people’s attitudes toward community, place, and public discourse on youth and the environment, and to constructively situate the concept of “a sense of place” within these insights for critical pedagogy and community development.

This project utilizes a grounded theory approach to identify salient themes in young people’s expressions of place relationships through poetry. About 677 poems about “local watersheds” written by youth aged 5–18 for the River of Words Poetry Contest between 1996 and 2009 are analyzed using poetic and content analysis.

Findings include the importance of place experiences that employ risk-taking and play, engage central family relationships, and provide access to historical and political narratives of place for the development of constructive place relationships. We also present findings regarding emotions in the sample, showing changing levels of hope and idealism, sadness, pessimism, and other emotions as expressed in the poems.

Using poetic analysis to study attitudes, values, and feelings is a promising method for learning more about the perceptions and values of individuals that affect their self-efficacy and agency.

Engaging youth as active participants and empathetic knowledge-creators in their own places offers one opportunity for critical reflective development in order to combat and reframe disempowering public discourses about young people and their relationships to nature and community. Educators can use this research to adapt contextually and emotionally rooted methods of place-based learning with their students.

The paper uses a nontraditional, mixed methods approach to research and a unique body of affective data. It makes a strong argument for reflective, experiential, and critical approaches to learning about nature and society issues in local contexts.

The purpose of our chapter is to contribute to the current literature on sport and the environment by introducing an ethic of sustainability embedded in the historical and ongoing place-based physical cultures of Fisher River Cree Nation (Ochékwi Sipi).

Using an Indigenous-centered, community-based research design, we conducted four sharing circles with a total of 13 Elders from Fisher River Cree Nation. Sharing circles are a culturally safe discussion format for Elders to share their experiences and perspectives, which is significant in that Elders serve as critical links in the intergenerational communication of Cree place-based knowledge.

The key finding of this research is presented, centering around the more-than-human ethic that emerges from the place-specific stories of movement and physical culture shared by the Elders.

Based on the stories of the Elders we show how intimate and deeply embodied knowledges are formed over the course of generations of living with, learning from, and moving across Land. The knowledge gathered from this research presents an alternative to the dominant Western worldview and may serve as a critical link in struggles for environmental and social sustainability.

This chapter focuses upon high school preparation and transition planning activities as they apply to students with disabilities. The reader will find a review of needs for reform of high school standards-based curricula, the development of inclusive general education curriculum content, and strategies for integrating functional and daily living skill training and meaningful transition planning activities, which include collaboration with adult agencies. The authors further present a number of evidence-based practices to address these needs and make recommendations for moving forward in ways to improve post-school outcomes for youth with disabilities.

This chapter addresses the outcomes of a six-year school–university partnership between a public liberal arts college and a large urban school district. It explores ways that partnerships can support teachers and communities to confront assumptions and take ownership of learning. This paper traces the trajectory of teachers and professors engaged in a longitudinal ongoing professional development initiative focused on “Meeting the Needs of Urban Learners” to identify practices that supported the collaboration, and the outcomes of the school–university partnership.

This chapter proposes a reconceptualization of undergraduate education to support the development of students as agents of positive social change. Social innovation education is put forward as a new pedagogy for the twenty-first century.

The chapter outlines a series of studies carried out at the University of Northampton between 2014 and 2015 to investigate social innovation education as a pedagogical design and practice for undergraduate curricula. Drawing on phenomenography, systematic literature review, and theory building, this chapter sets out conceptual, theoretical, and practical frameworks for designing and facilitating social innovation education.

Research findings include an ontology for understanding the concept of social innovation education, as well as a set of graduate attributes for designing learning for social change. A model of pedagogical praxis is proposed that supports the development of teaching and learning toward a more critical and socially impactful approach.

Despite some similarities to entrepreneurship and enterprise education, social innovation education is distinctive in its focus on social change-making with or without financial gain. Not only does this chapter present a set of abstract and practical tools for embedding social innovation in an undergraduate program, but also it provides a possible methodology for institutions who wish to embody particular principles within their curricular offerings.

This chapter examines cultural value creation through the 24 Carrot Gardens Project. Initiated by artist and curator Kirsha Kaechele of the Museum of Old and New Art, the vision of 24 Carrot Gardens is to ‘sow seeds of lifelong learning’ in the areas of health, well-being and sustainability across school communities in Tasmania, Australia. What has eventuated over its five years is a complex relationship between the artful ‘gold standard’ delivered by professional artists and a contemporary art museum with an integrated teaching and site-based learning across the arts and sciences. Designed in response to the local environmental, cultural and socio-economic context, 24 Carrot Gardens has contributed to a growing sense of community engagement, interdisciplinary learning and a strong foundation of networked donor investment. With these multilayered interests across a diversity of stakeholders and partnerships, many competing systems of value are at play, with the potential to contribute a new value creation. Firsthand accounts of project contributors are situated amongst the scholarly literature to produce an examination of value exchange and creation including the cultural values identified in 24 Carrot Gardens: artistic and creative, economic and industrial and education and environmental. Following this interrogation of the expressed values in this case study, we offer a foundation for a new framework for understanding local cultural value.