Place-based pedagogies allow for education to incorporate the geographical and physical context of learning. This framework provides elementary literacy educators with authentic and meaningful ways for students to engage. Some of the benefits of place-based education are: "connected to experiential learning, contextual learning, problem-based learning, constructivism, indigenous education… as well as other approaches that are concerned with context and the value of learning from and nurturing specific places, communities, or regions" (Gruenewald, 2003, p. 3). Furthermore, experiences in place, such as out in the local
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community or exploring the natural world, "help children develop cognitive skills and begin to understand the world around them" (Brillant & Mankiw, 2015, p. 18). Somerville describes the place pedagogies framework as such: "place learning is necessarily embodied and local; our relationship to place is communicated in stories, and other representations; place learning involves a contact zone of contested place stories" (Somerville, 2007, p. 149). Therefore, place is connected to literacy in how we as humans express place, and how we express a place through literacy and narrative can and does shape the place.
Place-based pedagogies also hold value in recognition of how where we come from shapes who we are, which is essential to recognize in a classroom in order to determine social context. For example, "places teach us about how the world works, and how our lives fit into the spaces we occupy. Further places make us: As occupants of particular attributes, our identity and our possibilities are shaped" (Somerville, 2007, p. 151). For students who are first- or second-generation immigrants, place-based learning is especially important to recognize that
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Metissage |
their place-based resources shape students' knowledge. Mendoza describes metissage as a space where two cultures can come together in dialogue without constructing a hybrid (Mendoza, 2018, para. 25). "When teachers respond to learners' place-based funds of knowledge and invite them into metissage to dialogue with mass discourses, they create rich learning contexts for literacy development across the curriculum and beyond" (Mendoza, 2018, para. 30). Place-based pedagogy recognizes the significance of the local environment and what there is to learn from the land and a specific place.