The power of place to spark learning and belonging

In a higher education landscape marked by technological upheaval and student mental health concerns, it’s easy to forget that we already know so much about what helps students learn and feel well. The scholarship of teaching and learning has firmly established that improving students’ sense of belonging aids academic achievement and well-being. 

One powerful and proven way for educators to foster belonging is to embed place-based learning. This pedagogical approach aligns course content with local human and non-human communities and brings students outside the classroom to integrate their lived experiences into the learning process. 

Place-based learning foregrounds something many students want but often don’t know how to find: a sense of connection to something bigger than themselves. In a time when students face financial precarity, mental health challenges and growing social and ecological crises, academic experiences that help them develop meaningful relationships with each other, their communities and the physical world can inspire hope. 

To write my book Teaching toward slow hope: place-based learning in college and beyond, I immersed myself in four place-based college programmes that recast the college classroom as embedded in the surrounding landscape and community. Through observing these programmes in action and interviewing students and faculty, I discovered four key practices that enable student engagement with place and enhance belonging: deep listening, reciprocity, collaboration and embodied learning. There’s no universal, scalable model for place-based learning, but prioritising these practices can create an effective foundation for a place-based programme anywhere.

Deep listening 

A place-based learning programme at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Buildings Landscapes Cultures (BLC) Field School conducts oral histories in underserved Milwaukee communities. The heart of this work is the practice of deep listening. In her bestselling book How to do nothing: resisting the attention economy, Jenny Odell describes deep listening as “a heightened sense of receptivity and reversal of our usual cultural training, which teaches us to quickly analyse and judge more than to simply observe”. Arijit Sen, who directs the BLC Field School, sparks this “sense of receptivity” through connecting students with community members and training them to centre listening in their conversations with them. In the process, he empowers students to collect and amplify community stories and helps them forge relationships beyond campus. 

As former student Chelsea Wait attests, “I’ve gotten to know the city so well through the Field School, and more than that, I’m connected to this network of hope.” Every campus and neighbourhood has stories that warrant oral history work. Educators can foster deep listening by incorporating interviewing and community conversations into many kinds of classes. 

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Reciprocity

At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I observed a first-year seminar called Indigenous Arts and Sciences: Restoration Education and Stewardship. It paired hands-on campus ecological restoration activities with study of Indigenous practices of reciprocity, as presented by the course’s Native teachers. Students also read Native botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass. Kimmerer describes reciprocity as a gift economy in which use of land is attached to a “bundle of responsibilities”. 

During the seminar, students gathered, cleaned and planted native seeds in restored oak savannahs. They also removed invasive species from Native effigy mounds. In doing so, they learned that engaging with a place not only garners individual knowledge but is also a way to give back. This process spurred a sense of belonging. Student Ameya Baxi said that the seminar helped her “realise that you can make a place your home. [By] getting to know the environment, you can develop that relationship.” Her realisation suggests practical advice for teachers: help students become caretakers of their college home by incorporating ways they can contribute to the health of the college landscape in class. This can be as simple as planting trees or as complex as studying how to reduce campus energy use. 

Collaboration

The Kalamazoo Valley Community College’s Bronson Healthy Living Campus has become a national model for hands-on learning about food systems and health. There, I witnessed a collaborative community effort to heal people and an inner-city brownfield. This campus interweaves a food hub, urban farm, school of allied health professions, culinary school and sustainable brewing programme. All these programmes are also linked to local institutions including a hospital, senior centre, farms and schools. 

Culinary students learn about food systems by working in the campus food hub. Nursing students learn about food as medicine by cooking with crops grown on campus. As Rachel Bair, the director of sustainable food systems, explains, “We’re not only training the students in a real-world environment, we’re actually working in that environment to build the food and healthcare system that we then want our students to work in.” One teaching takeaway from this approach is to partner with community organisations and other campus departments to create mutually beneficial academic projects.

Embodied learning

In 2007, Northland College in Ashland, Wisconsin (now closed), developed a general education programme, Superior connections, which centred embodied experiences of local places linked to the knowledge and skills of the liberal arts. Weekly field trips with teaching faculty and a month-long capstone trip around Lake Superior modelled ways to read landscapes’ natural and human histories as students explored them physically, intellectually and emotionally. They hiked, canoed, conducted field research and talked with local residents as a part of their coursework. All this movement, sensory engagement and novelty promoted content learning, self-efficacy and a sense of belonging. 

The lesson here is that intentional design of embodied learning activities – even a short walk around campus or a visit to a local museum – can pay huge dividends in student understanding and enjoyment.

As these examples show, these four key practices of place-based learning can work in all kinds of educational settings: rural to urban, community college to flagship research university. And they help students flourish at university and beyond. 

Douglas Haynes is an associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh.

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