 Hello, and welcome to my presentation on place-based education at the Greenspire School for the K-12 Online Conference. My name is Erin Fitzpatrick, and I teach Language Arts at the Greenspire School in Traverse City, Michigan. I'm hoping that this presentation will not only teach you more about place-based education, but will allow you to implement it with your students. The Greenspire School is a small, environmentally focused charter school in Traverse City, Michigan. Currently, we have 75 students and six staff members who implement subjects like math, science, technology, language arts, social studies, physical education, outdoor education, and special ed services. I'll take you to our website so you can learn a little bit more about us and visit us at a later time. Charter schools in Michigan are sponsored by universities or independent school districts, and so we are sponsored by the Traverse City Area Public Schools, or TCAPS. You can find all sorts of information on our school at our website, so feel free to visit anytime. We also have a Facebook page, which you can find by searching Greenspire School on Facebook. The Greenspire School is founded on four main principles. The first being place-based education. Our small environment and our charter allow us to do things a little bit differently than traditional schools in the area. So we have a lot of education partnerships with people in the community. This allows students to make contacts, go on visits and shadows at local businesses, interview, and we have a lot of experts that come in to talk to the kids about really everything and anything. We employ an up-down-in-out philosophy, which allows students to get up out of their seats, down getting dirty in the dirt, planting gardens, working in the greenhouse. Inside would be, you know, inside-based practices and then outside is hiking and being stewards of the community. We also have an environmental focus at our school with a whole class donated to environmental studies, but also integrating environmental focus into every one of our projects. And our last kind of prong is passion-based learning or allowing students to research and develop passions in a specific area while being accountable for that information to their peers, to their parents, and to the staff. I'd like to take this opportunity to tell you a little bit more about place-based education. Place-based education takes students out into the community. With our up-down-in-out philosophy, we did a lot of shadows at businesses. We had a lot of people come in and take hikes with the kids out in the commons natural areas around our school. We wanted kids to be exposed to every community opportunity that they could. And we feel as, you know, stewards of our community we need to be in the community. Place-based education allows for real consequences. Students are accountable not only to their peers, but to their parents, to the staff, to the school, and to their community members. Every time we go into the community, we always ask and remind students that they are the banner children for our school. And so in following with our real consequences, they usually have timelines that are strictly adhered to and the students are able to work within that timeframe to submit their work. In place-based education, students play an active role in defining and shaping a project. It's more than just having a teacher come in and say, you know, this is what we're going to do today and this is how we're going to do it. We provide a very rough or general outline for things that need to be completed during the course of the project and then students are able to mold and modify those parameters to fit their needs. This is messy, but it works and it is what's best for kids. They really truly have ownership of what they learn in this model and they're able to shape the results so that their information is presented in the best possible way. Place-based education shapes the future of the student's environment. Whether it be a social, physical, or economic environment, we want students to understand that they are more than just the student in the school. They are community members and they will be stakeholders in the future when it comes to voting or decision-making. Getting students out into the community as early as possible allows them to see that communities are not static environments, but rather environments that can evolve and be shaped by the people within them. We want students to view their community as a living, adaptable, and purposefully modifiable environment. We know that communities rarely stay the same over the course of a generation and want students to understand very early on that if they want changes in their community, the changes will fall on their shoulders. Place-based education also allows for students to create representation of the systems that they live in. Whether it be a school within a neighborhood or a neighborhood within a city, we want students to understand hierarchy at all levels so that they're able to connect with their environment a little bit better. So in letting you know more about our event, the Grand Traverse Conservation District came to us and asked us to do a parklands event where the students would be telling the community about the parklands of the commons. The commons is an old state hospital that was renovated into kind of its own neighborhood. And we have over 40 acres of trails and forest and three different kind of ecosystems behind our school. So the conservation district said, hey, will you, you know, create this parkland event? And so I brought it to the kids and the kids were more than excited to create this event. So below you'll kind of see a picture snapshot of the stewardship parkland event as it appeared in the brochure. People were encouraged to either register online and the conservation district kind of took the reins as far as getting people signed up and disseminating the information about the event. They used information that the students gave them about the event, but they were kind of the ones putting everything out into the community. In addition to creating the live tour that was going to occur in April, the students also developed a mobile app. The app was made, came out of Michigan State University. It's called Tour Guide. It's a web-based app that allows you to see different plotted points on a map and allows you to, you know, punch in information so that you can follow along. So the event was live in April, but it's also been continuing throughout the school year and, you know, we update it occasionally throughout the year just to make sure that everything's correct. And again, it kind of facilitates that modifiable environment. Nothing's ever completely finished. You can always make it better. So below is just kind of a screenshot and we'll look more into the Tour Guide app now. So I can't tell you much about the app, but I can tell you what our students did within the confines of the app. The kids named themselves the Keepers of Kids Creek. Kids Creek is a small stream that runs through Traverse City and right in our backyard. So when I brought the project to the students, I asked them, what do you think the most important things about Kids Creek are? And so we developed a list of stations that would occur on the trail so that students were able to be responsible for one of the stations and also, you know, create information for that station. So the first station that we went over was Trail Etiquette. The students did research on Trail Etiquette. We looked at Leave No Trace literature. We looked at all sorts of different websites. We had people come in from around the community to talk about what it's like to be to share the trails and, you know, right-of-way and all those things that, when you're sharing trails with other people. We talked a little bit about water testing and the importance of water quality. We had visitors come in to do macro and vertebrate studies. We had people come in to do water testing with the kids using pH and turbidity and all sorts of different things. Our next station was Native and Invasive Species. So in the Cummins Natural area, there are native species or species that, you know, are native to Michigan that were not brought here by Europeans. And then we have our invasive species, our species that were brought over from a different area that sometimes overtake the native populations. We had a poop scoop station which talked about the importance of nitrates and picking up after dog waste. We had a tree harvesting station where students learned about tree harvesting, the importance of managing species in a forest, and the different ways that tree harvesting occurs. The next station was Trail Ecosystems. As I earlier mentioned, we have three distinct ecosystems in the Cummins Natural area, all the way from, you know, northern boreal forest to cedar swamp. So the kids talked about the difference in those ecosystems and how to identify the change from, you know, northern mesic to cedar forest. And then our last station was about the Grand Traverse Commons, which is the renovated state hospital. We have restaurants and all sorts of different things going on, community events and things like that. So after the tour, we partnered with a local coffee company to warm people up with a cup of coffee after the trail hike. It was really nice. So in addition to developing the stations and setting them up along the trail, it was not a permanent setup. We did set up QR codes along the trail, but the permanence was the QR codes and the tour guide app. So on the day of, the kids had tables set up and talked about the different stations and after the day of, we had stations set up so that people could go in with their smartphones. I'm just going to show you the example of what it would look like if you were taking the tour on your smartphone. So in addition to researching and developing information for each station to talk face to face, the students also recorded the information. We had a Up North Live, which is the local news company and some Peace Corps VISTA volunteers who came out with professional recording equipment and recorded our students giving their talk so that we could upload it to YouTube and put it on the app. So when you use your phone, you're able to see that there's a video. There's written instructions as to how to walk to each station because, you know, we're not out in the woods every day. And then there's also an aerial photograph of the station so that, you know, people don't get lost. Each station has a video, written directions, and a map feature, which is pretty nice. Every map feature is able to be, you know, zoomed in and things like that. So I'll just show you a couple more stations so you can see. I'm not going to play any of the videos. They are kind of long. But students worked in groups, put all their information on Google Docs and then created scripts. And the scripts were read in front of, you know, memorized and then recorded in front of the camera and put to YouTube. So that kind of outlines the Tour Guide app. So it was really interesting to have that face-to-face component in April and then to constantly have to update and check to make sure that the Tour Guide app is up to date. Like I said earlier with place-based education, the partnerships are very important. We had partners from the Grand Travers Conservation District talking about species. We had partners from Britain Banners who printed off our QR codes on plexiglass. And then we were able to attach them to sign posts and things around the trails. We had the Watershed Center as a partner. And we got all sorts of water testing and different information about water quality and macroinvertebrates. We had a partnership with Food for Thought, which is a local company who harvests native and invasive species to make food sources. But it's all relative to Northern Michigan. So in our native and invasive species station on the tour, Food for Thought provided autumn olive jam, which is a native invasive species. And people were able to try autumn olive jam while we talked about invasive species. And then one of our community partners that didn't quite work out because of weather. It's Northern Michigan. It was March. We had a couple of snow days. But we did partner with a local school to develop a kind of dry run for the tour. And the Elk Rapids Middle School Photography Club was supposed to come in and take pictures of the tour and kind of help us develop more of a website and a footprint. But it just didn't work out with snow days. So we're hoping to rekindle that relationship at a later date. Now I know a place-based education might seem daunting. And we kind of had a project fall in our lap because the conservation district knew about our school and knew that we would be a really good match for the parkland event. Some schools don't have built-in relationships like that. And that's okay. You can still do place-based education. So below I've outlined some resources that may help you get started in some place-based projects. The first resource is called Peace Jam. And Peace Jam is a program that outlines noble laureates. And they have a whole curriculum built around peace and what it's like to create peace in your community. It's a collaborative website. And you sign up and get all sorts of resources and things like that. And then you're able to upload your projects to the website so that they're able to be seen around the world. The second, if you're in the Great Lakes area and if you're not, there should be some sort of stewardship initiatives for the area in which you live. But the Great Lakes Stewardship Initiative is kind of what outlined our projects. The Great Lakes, the GLSI program kind of outlines the importance of water quality and watershed studies in grades K through 12. And so if your school becomes a part of the Stewardship Initiative you get training and all sorts of different resources so that you are able to get yourself out into the community. They also have a great conference that's coming up in November all about place-based education. So another thing I would probably research if I wasn't in a community with a lot of stewardship initiatives was trying to go to place-based education conferences where people are sharing what they're doing in their classrooms. Another website I found that maybe of help is called the Rural School and Community Trust. And this program outlines partnerships with schools, maybe not schools but different communities. And so you may be able to find some resources here that would help you with some current projects or place-based learning. There's a lot of resources. And the last resource I found was the Center for Ecoliteracy. And this outlines place-based education and environmentalism so you're able to go through and look at some of their resources as well. In addition to looking for your own resources I would be more than happy and absolutely thrilled if we were able to collaborate on a project in the future. You can find me a couple of different ways Twitter, Skype, Facebook and also feel free to email me. Contact information is on our Greensfire website as well. I look forward to hearing from you all and I'd be more than happy to answer any questions or help brainstorm some really great place-based education projects in your community. Thank you so much for listening and I hope to see your kids out in the community soon.