[1] Although educators have used its principles for some time, the approach was developed initially by The Orion Society,[2] a Massachusetts-based nonprofit organization, as well as Professor David Sobel, Project Director at Antioch University New England.
According to this pedagogy, grade school students often lose what place-based educators call their "sense of place" through focusing too quickly or exclusively on national or global issues.
This is not to say that international and domestic issues are peripheral to place-based education, but that students should first have a grounding in the history, culture and ecology of their surrounding environment before moving on to broader subjects.
Furthermore, at a time when industrial pollution, biodiversity/habitat loss, and aquifer depletion are becoming widespread and acute, such pressures often exacerbate the problems by encouraging unsustainable patterns of consumption and land use, and by weakening familial and community relationships that are deeply tied to the local environment.
The path to a sustainable existence must start with a fundamental reimagining of the ethical, economic, political and spiritual foundations upon which society is based, and this process needs to occur within the context of a deep local knowledge of place.
This, I believe, supports the propagation of an enlightened localism—a local/global dialectic that is sensitive to broader ecological and social relationships at the same time as it strengthens and deepens peoples sense of community and land.
It often employs a process of re-storying, whereby students are asked to respond creatively to stories of their homeground so that, in time, they are able to position themselves, imaginatively and actually, within the continuum of nature and culture in that place.