In schools
serving native communities throughout the world in general, and the
United States in particular, there is now an awakening to the need to
create a pedagogy of place. The learning from placing value on the relationship
we have with the particular land, plants, cultures and living things
of the places where we live. There is an increasing awareness of the
need to bring forward and integrate the knowledge of elders in our rural
native communities about the natural world into the instruction provided
in schools of our native children.
This is not just an issue of what content is taught in classrooms. the
purpose of our focus on the pedagogy of place in schools serving native
communities is to expand learning to include "lessons from the
hearts as well as those of the head". (Arizona State Senator Jack
Jackson, Navajo) In the Native Science Connections Project, we seek
to show students how to apply western knowledge as well as traditional
native knowledge and draw their own conclusions from their own experiences.
The school site projects you see on this webswite are applying place-based
education, particularly in science, in the context of indigenous communities.
Sites include Navajo, Pueblo, Native Hawaiian and Alaska Native communities.
