




































PLACE-BASED EDUCATION: MAKING THE CASE FOR AN INVESTIGATION OF 

HISTORICAL PRECENDENTS 

Charles J. Elfer 

Clayton State University 

 

Abstract 

 This article seeks to initiate an historical 

research agenda within the field of place-based 

education (PBE). A relatively new phrase in 

educational research, theory, and practice, the 

fundamental elements of place-based education 

are in fact quite mature and have deep historical 

roots. Despite a rich past, curricular historical 

work in the field is thoroughly underdeveloped. 

Following a brief characterization of the 

contemporary literature, three select historical 

illustrations are presented, each with the intent of 

highlighting both opportunities and deficiencies.  

 

Introduction 

Place-based education (PBE) is a term 

which refers to those forms of pedagogy which 

seek to connect learning to the cultural, historical, 

and ecological contexts in which schooling itself 

takes place. Participatory and active, PBE frames 

the learning process around the unique 

experiences, situations, and events in which 

schools are located. In the most general sense, 

then, place-based education is a reference to those 

pedagogies that emphasize, to one extent or 

another, the local in the educative process. In his 

seminal introductory text on the subject, one of 

several primers that exist to date, Sobel (2005) 

offered what has become perhaps the most 

widely-cited formal definition. The author 

explained: 

Place-based education is the process of 

using the local community and 

environment as a starting point to teach 

concepts in language arts, mathematics, 

social studies, science and other subjects 

across the curriculum. Emphasizing 

hands-on, real-world learning 

experiences, this approach to education 

increases academic achievement, helps 

students develop stronger ties to their 

community, enhances students‟ 

appreciation for the natural world, and 

creates a heightened commitment to 

serving as active, contributing citizens. 

Community vitality and environmental 

quality are improved through the active 

engagement of local citizens, community 

organizations, and environmental 

resources in the life of the school. (Sobel 

2005, 7)  

From the standpoint of curriculum development, 

place-based educational approaches draw on a 

consideration of all things local as a way of 

determining, at least in part, what knowledge is of 

most worth. More precisely, place-based models 

generally share in common (1) a commitment to 

the places in which learning is situated, (2) the 

nature of the learner, and (3) the stakeholders 

maintaining positions in the process. Although 

Sobel‟s definition has been reworked and re-

phrased by many, his version is nonetheless 

illustrative of the essential themes outlined in 

other variations. 

 In an account of his tenure with the Bread 

Leaf School of English at Middlebury College in 

Vermont, John Elder revealed that the phrase 

place-based education grew out of his own 

collaboration with Laurie Lane-Zucker and the 

Orion Society in the early 1990s (The Orion 

Society 1998; Lane-Zucker 2010). While this 

collaboration between the Orion Society and 



2 

 

Middlebury College, between Elder and Lane-

Zucker, marks the source of the place-based 

heading as a named approach to teaching and 

learning, numerous other headings describe 

similar perspectives. A short list might include 

place-consciousness, community-based 

education, outdoor education, rural education, 

ecological and environmental education, and 

bioregional education, and there are perhaps 

more still. Again, what is important is that all 

share a fundamental commitment, though perhaps 

in distinctive ways, to the places in which 

learning is situated, the nature of the learner, and 

the stakeholders maintaining positions in the 

process. Yet many of these terms and the 

educational perspectives they represent boast 

lineages that stretch well beyond the formation of 

place-based education in the early 1990s. 

Strangely enough, despite what may be deep 

historical roots, few have ventured to consider the 

historical dimensions of the approach in a 

thorough and systematic fashion. It is this feature 

of the field, its virtual ahistoricism, which 

provides the context for the discussion that 

follows.  

Several important features emerge through 

an examination of the existing research into 

place-based theory and practice. In the first 

instance, it is abundantly clear that the field lacks 

historical consciousness and that the historical 

dimensions of place-based pedagogy are ripe for 

exploration. Secondly, and of no lesser import, 

curriculum historians and place-based educators, 

in particular, must recognize that the historical 

work is worth doing. Following a brief 

consideration of the existing historical work in the 

field, three select case examples are presented in 

an effort to initiate a broader and more deliberate 

historical research agenda. 

Hints and Glimmers of the Past 

To be sure, place-based educational 

research is not altogether ahistorical. There are, in 

fact, hints and glimmers of the past scattered 

throughout the literature. There is a general 

recognition, as the discussion below reveals, of 

the theoretical connections that place-based 

education shares with early twentieth-century 

progressive educational thinkers. But while few 

place-based proponents argue that the approach is 

entirely new, an equal few have endeavored to 

explore this assumption. In short, historical work 

within the field of place-based education is far 

from complete and it is within this assumption 

that the call for new and more systematic 

historical investigation originates.  

In reviewing contemporary place-based 

educational literature (those examples in which 

scholars reference the formal phrase place-based 

education), what readers typically find is a casual 

respect for the theoretical overlap that exists 

between modern versions of place-based 

education and elements of early twentieth-century 

educational progressivism. In their introductory 

comments to Place-Based Education in the 

Global Age, for instance, Gruenewald and Smith 

pointed out that “all education prior to the 

common school was place-based” (2008, 1). In 

the same text, Knapp (2008) offered a similar 

perspective. He added: 

 

Today the field of place-based education 

has established itself a paper trail of 

thousands of pages in its young life as an 

educational movement. This doesn't 

mean that place-based education has 

never before been tried in schools and 

other educational institutions. In fact, the 

idea of learning from the local 

surroundings predates the formation of 

formal schooling … From the late 1800s 

to the present time, several movements 

in schools have promoted the 

educational use of local areas as integral 



3 

 

parts on the curriculum … (Knapp 2008, 

6). 

 

From these short passages, it is clear that place-

based educational scholars have recognized the 

existence of historical antecedents to modern 

place-based initiatives. At the same time, 

however, none of these authors, and few other 

place-based researchers, have endeavored to 

explore the historical domain in-depth. Even the 

most recent volume on the subject, Smith and 

Sobel‟s Place- and Community-Based Education 

in Schools (2010), devotes just nine pages to 

historical antecedents. Laudable perhaps for its 

“acknowledge[ment] that there is nothing new 

about place-based education” (Smith and Sobel 

2010, 25), it falls short of any sort of systematic 

review of historical precedents. And this is the 

point precisely.  

As is true of American educational 

literature generally, references to the work of 

John Dewey are not infrequent in the writing of 

place-based educators. Woodhouse and Knapp 

(2000), for instance, reported that place-based 

education “usually includes conventional outdoor 

education methodologies as advocated by John 

Dewey to help students connect with their 

particular corners of the world” (1). This 

represents the extent of their historical analysis, 

however. Another well-known contributor to the 

growing body of place-based educational 

scholarship, Smith (2002a; 2002b; 2007), too, has 

made consistent reference to the educational 

philosophies of Dewey. In an article entitled 

“Going Local,” Smith (2002a) explained that  “by 

focusing on students' local context, proponents 

address one of John Dewey's (1899/1959) major 

concerns about 19th century public schools that 

still applies to this century: the lack of connection 

between formal schooling and students' lives, …” 

(31). Like others, Smith does a great deal to draw 

connections within the confines of singular 

articles and book chapters outside of the historical 

field, yet his valuable contributions nonetheless 

fall short of in-depth historical consideration. In 

fact, Jayandhandan‟s recent contribution entitled 

“John Dewey and a Pedagogy of Place,” 

published late 2009, stands as perhaps the sole 

counterexample to this tendency. 

Beyond Dewey, there are several other 

glimmers of an historical consciousness in the 

place-based educational literature. Paul 

Theobald's continued efforts to investigate rural 

education have positioned him as a key figure in 

the contemporary field. Following Call School 

(1995), his first extended historical publication 

exploring the demise of the rural school in the 

American Midwest to 1918, Theobald has 

developed his interest in rural schools into a 

deeper advocacy for the renewal of a sense of 

community through localized education. As the 

author explained in Teaching the Commons: 

 

This book is premised on two 

assumptions … First, rural schools ought 

to have a place in the educational 

landscape of this country … Second, 

schools ought to attend more 

consciously to their physical place on 

earth and the social, political, and 

economic dynamics that surround it. 

Doing so would render the entire school 

experience more meaningful and, in the 

process, would contribute in a small, 

though not insignificant, way to a 

cultural healing desperately needed in 

American society. (Theobald 1997, 7)  

 

The notion that a rural, place-based education 

might provide opportunities for the establishment 

or restoration of an arguably more sustainable, 

community-focused ethos, both locally and 



4 

 

throughout the nation, is a theme that 

characterizes much of Theobald's writing. But 

while his work is often historical in nature, or 

contains elements of historical analysis, his 

writing is not generally framed within the context 

of place-based education per se. Rather than a 

history, in part or in full, of place-based 

educational theory or practice, Theobald's 

valuable historical work stands as a critical 

appraisal of American schooling and the notion of 

community, which often ends with a call for a 

shift toward a more place-conscious education. 

The challenge of producing a history, or histories, 

of place-based education, particularly one 

approaching a deeper consideration of practice, 

remains unmet. 

Hutchison's (2004) comprehensive 

evaluation of place and schooling, A Natural 

History of Place in Education, represents a 

holistic appraisal of the variety of meanings that 

the notion of place might hold in educational 

contexts. Hutchison also included specific 

discussion of what he referred to as the 

“pedagogy of place” (2004, 26), which links the 

text, albeit somewhat indirectly, to place-based 

education. At the same time, however, Hutchison 

centered the bulk of his historical consideration 

on educational spaces and school and classroom 

environments. The notion of place-based 

education which incorporates the historical, 

ecological, and cultural particularities of a given 

locale as sources for curricular choices exists, for 

the most part, outside of the historically-focused 

portions of Hutchison's text. No doubt a seminal 

contribution, A Natural History of Place in 

Education Hutchison (2004) cannot be viewed as 

more than a partial history of place-based 

education as it neither emphasized the 

development of the strategy over time nor 

systemically analyzed curricular antecedents.  

In a recent dissertation, Greenfield (2005) 

attempted to link the ecological consciousness of 

several early environmental thinkers to modern 

environmental education. Exploring the work of 

key figures such as Henry David Thoreau, Aldo 

Leopold, and Edward O. Wilson, Greenfield 

concluded that “place-based  learning, critical 

thinking, and the interconnectedness of 

knowledge characterized these individuals' 

naturalistic philosophy toward learning [emphasis 

added]” (2005, 1). In the same year, Knapp 

(2005) drew a similar connection between 

Leopold's I-Thou relationship and place-based 

education and insisted that a deeper consideration 

of other naturalists, “such as John Muir, John 

Burroughs, Henry D. Thoreau, Gilbert White, 

Edwin Way Teale, Rachel Carson, Annie Dillard, 

Sally Carrighar, Virginia Eifert, and Anne 

Morrow Lindbergh” (2005, 284), might reveal 

similar valuable lessons for place-based 

educational researchers. More recently, Knapp 

has reported that “Newman and Oliver [in 1967] 

thoroughly outlined an educational plan that 

linked formal schooling with the community 

context without inventing a specific label for it” 

(2008, 7). Orr (1992) found a similar historical 

connection in Lewis Mumford's call for regional 

surveys in the 1940s. But again, aside from the 

general recognition that historical antecedents 

might exist, both Knapp (2005; 2008) and Orr 

(1992), like the vast majority of other place-based 

proponents, stop short of any sort of in-depth or 

systematic historical analysis of place-based 

educational theory and practice. Without 

overlooking their efforts to identify potentially 

fruitful areas for historical research, these 

valuable contributions have failed to engage in 

the historical work itself. As is true of other 

dimensions of the field, there is more work to be 

done. 



5 

 

Duffin remarked in a recent PBE-focused 

dissertation that the approach “is such an open 

and flexible proto-theory of education that it 

flows into a million different connections to other 

theories of education and society” (2006, 24). If 

Duffin's assessment was even modestly accurate, 

it is somewhat surprising that so few place-based 

educational researchers have ventured to embark 

on journeys that are historical in nature. While an 

exhaustive exploration of those million different 

connections might be overly cumbersome, the 

paucity of historical evaluations of place-based 

educational theory, let alone historical 

representations of practice, is difficult to 

comprehend. 

 

The Tip of an Iceberg 

Opportunities for a new, or expanded, 

historical research agenda in the field of place-

based education are vast. What observers might 

conclude about the existing place-based 

educational literature is that while the field's 

historical consciousness might be 

underdeveloped, the historical road map has 

begun to take shape. In other words, while the 

work has yet to be done in most cases, there is 

general consensus on some of those key areas 

where the historical work in the field might begin. 

Others nodes, of course, have yet to be identified. 

Through the illustrations below, specifically the 

Berry School of northwest Georgia, the Penn 

School of coastal South Carolina, and the well-

known Foxfire method, both issues are clarified; 

that is, the several select historical illustrations of 

place-based education highlighted below work 

simultaneously to identify new dimensions for 

exploration while problematizing existing 

examples. The case illustrations presented are all 

representative of the American South. This 

feature of the article is largely coincidental and 

further exploration will undoubtedly reveal a 

much broader geographic influence. 

The Berry School 

 Martha Berry's pioneering efforts to 

establish a school for rural Appalachian boys at 

the turn of the twentieth century stands as but one 

unexplored historical illustration of place-based 

education in practice. Even a cursory review of 

the institutional bulletins published by the Berry 

School reveals connections, yet neither Berry nor 

her schools have received mention in the 

literature. While the institution changed 

dramatically as the Boys Industrial School 

(founded 1902) grew into the coeducational Berry 

College by the early 1930s, a certain attention to 

the local in the curriculum was evident 

throughout the school's early history and across 

virtually all disciplines. Consider for example, 

excerpts from the science curriculum as described 

in the 1906-1907 edition of The Berry School 

Bulletin. 

 

Freshman Year: Fall Term - 

Physiography. This is a four months‟ 

course, with daily recitations. Besides 

the study of the text-book, the class does 

some field work, examining under the 

direction of the teacher, certain aspects 

of the physical conformation of the 

section in the immediate vicinity of the 

School. (26) 

 

While complimented with traditional classroom 

instruction, the suggestion that the immediate 

vicinity of the school might serve an educational 

purpose represents a place-based perspective. In 

addition to course and laboratory work following 

the freshman year, the same bulletin noted how 

the growing agricultural functions of the Berry 

School were to be achieved. Under the heading 

Agricultural Department, the following place-

based approach was outlined: 



6 

 

Although this is not strictly an 

agricultural school it aims to give that 

practical knowledge of Agriculture 

which will enable any boy to become 

and intelligent and successful farmer. 

This training is given by class recitations 

in Agriculture and by practical work on 

the school farm. 

The farm consists of about five hundred 

acres and is one of the most important 

resources of the School … This year 

about seventy-five acres of corn has 

been planted, which will provide for the 

stock on the farm for the coming year … 

It is our aim to make the agricultural 

training the best of any school in the 

South. (The Berry School Bulletin 1906-

1907, 28-9) 

 

In some sense, these several passages might lead 

observers to conclude that the vocational aspects 

of Berry overwhelmed the place-focused 

approach; that is, that Berry was more concerned 

with technical training than any sort of 

educational philosophy grounded in the local. 

This is a reasonable conclusion, but incomplete 

for several reasons. While a focus of the Berry 

School was always agricultural and industrial 

education, features that remains evident in Berry 

College even today, that focus did not preclude a 

place-based approach to learning, be it 

agricultural, industrial, or otherwise. The 

particular area of northwest Georgia in which the 

school was located, indeed much of Georgia and 

the South at the turn of the century, were, in fact, 

heavily invested economically, culturally, and 

politically in agriculture. Agriculture, and more 

broadly the goal of educational improvement for 

the then impoverished agricultural families of 

Appalachia, was always part of Berry's mission 

and a reflection of local conditions. This focus is 

apparent in the course catalogues dating between 

1905 and 1922 and explicitly stated in the 

annually reoccurring section titled Special 

Information for Students. 

 

Candidates for admission must live in 

the country, must be unable to attend a 

more expensive school … No city boys 

are accepted as students … The 

following boys also are not wanted: 

Those who are "headed for town," 

whose ambition in life is to be a clerk, 

bookkeeper, chauffer, insurance agent, 

"drummer," street-car conductor, book-

agent, "dude," etc. or who are looking 

for easy jobs. (The Berry School Bulletin 

1912-1913, 49) 

 

The dedication to those boys, and later girls, 

intent on a rural life, not a life in the nearby city 

of Rome, Georgia, was evident.  

A more direct refutation to any claim that 

the Berry School was purely an agricultural one is 

evidenced through the fact that throughout the 

early bulletins were descriptions of a whole-

curriculum grounded in the local; that is, the 

evidence for a place-based approach at Berry 

extends well beyond the agricultural components 

of the curriculum. The English and social studies 

curricula, for instance, maintained a place-based 

attentiveness to issues local, Georgian, and 

Southern. In addition to Nature Study, a 

curriculum component found throughout Berry‟s 

Grammar School course descriptions, one finds a 

place-based approach to geography education. 

The following Geography II course description 

provides an illustration: 

 

Throughout the course in this subject the 

view-point is always that of the homes 

of the students and constant reference is 

made to local conditions. The work is 

made interesting and practical through 

the use of maps, pictures, models, 



7 

 

apparatus and field observations. (The 

Berry School Bulletin 1912-1913, 25) 

 

The passage is telling in that appears to reveal a 

locally-focused approach to teaching and 

learning, one that built on student interest of those 

things familiar, perhaps believed to be inherent in 

the learner's experience. The description of 

Berry‟s Country Life course offers further 

evidence.  

 

The aim of this course is to take the 

everyday activities of the boys on the 

farm and make these the basis for 

arithmetic, science and agriculture … 

Most of the boys in this class have 

studied very little arithmetic in the rural 

communities from which they come. The 

practical way in which arithmetic, 

agriculture, economics, and current 

events are blended enable the quick 

assimilation of what otherwise would be 

dry and indigestible material. No definite 

text-book is used during this year, but 

the students are encouraged to 

accumulate and read bulletins on the 

subjects discussed in class. (The Berry 

School Bulletin 1921-1922, 47) 

 

In many ways, this passage reads like a modern 

description of place-based education. As an 

important aside, the passage also provides an 

interesting link between place-based education, 

The Berry School, and the Country Life 

Movement. In this way, a deeper consideration of 

the Berry curricula and philosophy may add 

significantly to the historical portrait provided by 

Canniff (1998) and her work on the theoretical 

connections between modern place-based 

education and the Country Life Movement. 

But what of the other social studies 

courses, mathematics, English, and literature? 

While not present in every course description, an 

attention to the local existed in each component 

of the curriculum, with the possible exceptions of 

Bible Studies and Music. With regard to the 

social studies, the bulk of the coursework was 

historical in nature and not explicitly place-based. 

Despite the persistence of what appears to be a 

more traditional history curriculum, however, a 

place-conscious theme did permeate a number of 

other social studies courses.  Coupled with the 

Geography II excerpt cited above, selections from 

the course descriptions for Civics I and 

Economics I below lend further support to the 

argument that the early Berry School exemplified 

a place-based approach in practice which pre-

dates modern initiatives. 

 

Civicts I [sic]. An elementary study of 

the structure and function of local, state 

and national government, with study and 

practice in the ordinary duties of rural 

citizenship, including things a boy 

should know about the law. 

Economics I. An elementary course in 

political economy, ethics, and the duties 

of American citizenship, special 

reference being paid to rural conditions 

and needs. (The Berry School Bulletin 

1921-1922, 51-52) 

 

In both Civics and Economics, the rural focus 

arguably represented an attempt to make the 

social studies locally relevant and representative 

of the lives lived by Berry students. 

Much like the persistence of traditional 

history, English courses had perhaps the least 

place-focused flavor at Berry. This trend was 

particularly salient at the high school level as 

illustrated through the curricular emphasis on 

classic, non-local texts. At the grammar school 

level, however, the use of Stewart's Country Life 

Readers suggests localized, rural topics were at 

least present. While the course descriptions for 

high school English and literature courses did not 



8 

 

indicate a place-based approach directly, student 

work on The Advance, the school paper designed 

"to give items of news in regard to local 

happenings, and also furnish an opportunity for 

literary effort on the part of students" (The Berry 

School Bulletin 1905-1906, 24), may have served 

a similar purpose. In fact, to approach disciplinary 

learning through local journalism is not at all 

unlike other historical place-based educational 

practices, namely the cultural journalism method 

illustrated through the Foxfire program.  

Place-based elements were even apparent 

in mathematics course descriptions, though 

perhaps less pronounced given the nature of the 

subject area. Mathematics VII, for instance, 

boasted “practical applications to country life,” 

(The Berry School Bulletin 1921-1922, 48) while 

Mathematics X offered work in “simple 

bookkeeping, particularly as applied to the farm, 

shop and home” (49). The same place-based 

focus was evident in the education courses 

described in the Berry bulletins. Both courses 

recorded reportedly maintained “special reference 

to rural school work,” and, particularly in Course 

II, the rural high school‟s “place in the 

community life, the training of leaders, and … 

agricultural and industrial training for country 

life” (The Berry School Bulletin 1921-1922, 52).  

Even where the focus was agricultural, the 

Berry School course bulletins were suggestive of 

an experiential, place-based approach. Whether 

horticulture and gardening, botany and forestry, 

or animal husbandry, course descriptions 

maintained a focus on the subject as relevant to, 

and in the context of, local circumstance. The 

course description for Botany and Forestry 

provides as an example. 

 

Each student is required to work out a 

practical plan for the management of the 

average forested area on a 160-acre 

farm; considerable attention is also given 

to the relation of the state and national 

governments to forestry and to its 

influences upon the industrial and social 

welfare of rural communities. (The Berry 

School Bulletin 1921-1922, 53) 

 

Throughout the curriculum, then, at least as 

represented through the institution's bulletins and 

course descriptions, the Berry School appears to 

have advocated and implemented a place-based 

approach to its work with rural Appalachian 

students in northwest Georgia. Despite what 

appears to be a rich historical illustration of place-

based education in practice, the Berry School has 

been entirely overlooked by place-based 

researchers.  

 

 

The Penn School  

Whereas the Berry experiment was 

designed to serve rural white boys in Georgia's 

Appalachian foothills, the Penn School was 

initially intended to educate newly freed slaves of 

South Carolina's Sea Islands. Established in 1862 

on St. Helena Island, South Carolina and in 

operation until the late 1940s, the Penn school 

stands as another early illustration of place-based 

education and a model of practice that has 

remained unstudied. In his introductory remarks 

to School Acres, an internally produced history of 

the Penn School published in 1930, Paul Kellogg 

offered a description of the school's mission. He 

noted: 

 

The experience of Penn in education "of 

the people, by the people, for the people" 

not only plays luminously on the needs 

of rural districts the country over, but 

upon a dilemma confronting our cities. 

Miss Cooley reveals how the New 

England school of the "three R's" with 

its academic ramifications fell short 



9 

 

when it came to training-for-life under 

the changing conditions of the rural 

South. She sets forth a strategy and spirit 

of the two revolutions at Penn School- 

how the life of the farms was brought 

into the classrooms, and the how through 

the school acres and other extramural 

activities the process was reversed and 

the educational impulse was spread to 

the ends of the island. (Cooley 1930, 

xiv) 

 

From its democratic approach to building the 

community through the school to the explicit 

effort to bring the life experiences of students into 

the classroom, the description that Kellogg 

provided points to the Penn School's place-based 

educational outlook, both its purposes and its 

methods. 

Laura M. Towne, founder of the Penn 

School, embarked on her experiment with an 

understanding that a traditional, perhaps detached, 

educational system was not meeting the needs of 

local students and local communities. As Rossa 

Cooley, once principal of the Penn School, noted: 

 

… the limitations of a purely academic 

education became etched deeply in the 

life of the island. They are the same 

limitations that are to be found, repeated 

over and over again, in the average 

Negro school in the rural South. They 

are the same limitations which mark the 

general run of rural schools the country 

over; the same limitations which mark 

much of the work of the mission schools 

in foreign lands which have taken over 

too faithfully the models of our 

traditional schooling; the same 

limitations which in various guises have 

confronted elementary and high schools 

and colleges everywhere. (Cooley 1930, 

4) 

 

Clearly critical of educational waste generally, 

The Penn School intended to offer an alternative 

suited specifically to the needs of the community 

and students it served. As Cooley phrased it, the 

Penn School brought “the school to the farms, and 

making this oldest of Negro schools in a sense the 

newest – an all-island school, an all-the-year-

round school, merging school and community 

into a common adventure” (1930, 5). The 

community-to-school relationship indicated by 

Cooley (1930) is clear evidence of a place-based 

approach to teaching and learning. 

Founders created the Penn School to serve 

the local community, in this case an African-

American one, but Cooley's (1930) appraisal of 

the approach at Sea Islands, suggested a belief in 

the transferability of the locally-focused model. 

Reflecting on the school's past, Cooley remarked: 

 

Nor was this peculiar to the race. How 

many white children in America went 

through our public schools during these 

same decades with little consideration of 

how their education might fit them for 

the life they must fit into? And all over 

the world in the mission fields (with 

noteworthy exceptions), we can see the 

same tendency – an education that is 

plastered on, regardless of the life and 

the needs of the people. (1930, 20) 

 

The lament expressed over an education that is 

plastered on lends further credence to a wider 

appreciation for an educational approach that is 

home-grown. Cooley's claim that the old method 

of education was one that favored “isolated facts 

learned not because they fitted into life but 

because they fitted into the examinations” (1930, 

36) is perhaps even more telling, not to mention 

oddly familiar. 

As were her remarks on the school's 

mission and educational approach, Cooley's 



10 

 

(1930) descriptions of Penn students and their 

work are clarifying. In no small part, the Penn 

School curriculum was framed through 

agriculture, specifically through the school's 

miniature farms. As Cooley explained, 

“arithmetic and agriculture played into each 

other's hands” (1930, 47). She continued: 

 

Each pupil was given a small plot of 

land [and later] we put a whole group on 

another acre of old cotton land to raise 

corn … the land rented from the school; 

and the cost of the seeds, fertilizer, time 

of "man and mule," and the net returns 

of the crop made a computation 

worthwhile … New enthusiasm was thus 

kindled for the next year's work. (Cooley 

1930, 48) 

 

Preserving the local history of the Sea 

Islands was another task taken up by Penn 

students. The Folklore Society, Cooley reported, 

held “responsibility for seeing to it that these 

songs of people are preserved in the midst of a 

faster life” (1930. 20). Although Cooley‟s (1930) 

representations were in some ways incomplete, 

the attention to local history seems clear and is 

suggestive of a social studies education that was 

at least partially place-based. The school and its 

curriculum deserve further attention in the context 

of an historical review of place-based education.  

Again, despite rather solid connections, 

neither the Penn School nor the Berry Schools 

have appeared in the existing literature on place-

based education. There may be other historical 

examples, perhaps numerous ones, akin to Berry 

and Penn that deserve attention. But the call for 

historical perspective in place-based education 

runs deeper still. In addition to what are possibly 

dozens of unexplored curricular models, those 

historical antecedents already noted by place-

based researchers have generally received only 

shallow consideration. The Foxfire program of 

northwest Georgia‟s Rabun Gap serves as one 

example.  

 

Foxfire  

Foxfire, named for a phosphorescent fungi 

native to southern Appalachia, was a place-based 

initiative that grew out of the Rabun Gap-

Nacoochee School near Cleveland, Georgia. The 

institution that later evolved into the Rabun Gap 

School was founded by Andrew Richie in 1905 

and functioned as a hybrid organization, with 

both public and private support. During the 

daytime hours, the school was publically funded, 

including its teaching staff, while the non-school 

hours were overseen by a privately owned and 

operated school board and administration 

(Puckett, 1989). Foxfire was not established until 

much later, not until the late 1960s under the 

initial direction Eliot Wigginton. 

Plagued by an uninterested and sometimes 

unruly group of English students, Foxfire was 

Wigginton‟s effort to promote engagement by 

redirecting the disciplinary fundamentals under 

study through a consideration of local 

Appalachian lifeways. The result was a school 

publication which reported on everything from 

the homemade distillation of moonshine to 

methods for killing hogs and procuring souse 

meat. Often referred to as cultural journalism, the 

Foxfire Magazine and associated texts, which 

ultimately grew to national prominence by the 

1970s and 1980s, was a practice in cultural and 

historical preservation. More importantly, it was 

place-based in every way. 

Several references to Foxfire do appear in 

the existing literature on place-based education. 

Smith and Sobel‟s (2010) recent volume included 

a paragraph on the program and briefly 

highlighted the contributions of the much less 



11 

 

frequently referenced leadership of Hilton Smith. 

The authors noted: 

 

The Foxfire journals and books explored 

the unique characteristics of 

Appalachian culture in northern Georgia. 

They inspired the development of 

similar journals and books across the 

United States and became a basis for an 

educational model that affected hundreds 

if not thousands of teachers through 

Foxfire training institutes … Although 

the great majority of Foxfire activities 

centered around the collection of oral 

histories, under the leadership of Hilton 

Smith and others the program also 

investigated contemporary issues and 

involved students in local decision-

making processes. (Smith and Sobel 

2010, 28) 

 

While Smith and Sobel‟s (2010) assessment is 

valuable, there may be more to learn from the 

place-based educational approach exemplified 

through Foxfire.  

 The degree to which the Foxfire initiatives 

of Rabun Gap were student-directed is not 

entirely settled. The following passage from 

Puckett‟s Foxfire Reconsidered, published 1989, 

is clarifying: 

 

In an early formulation of his 

pedagogical creed, Wigginton opined 

that Foxfire was a sounder and more 

powerful approach to teaching English 

than textbook or lecture methods: “Is the 

subject, English, ignored in the process? 

Hardly. In fact, the opposite is true. 

English, in its simplest definition, is 

communication – reaching out and 

touching people with words, sounds, and 

visual images. We are in the business of 

improving students‟ prowess in these 

areas…In their [magazine] work … they 

learn more about English than any other 

curriculum I could devise. (75) 

 

But as Puckett went on to point out, “The reality 

of Foxfire fails to support Wigginton‟s rhetoric … 

Indeed, Foxfire‟s potential as a writing 

curriculum is diminished by a style of staff 

editing and teaching that is geared more to 

publication deadlines than to the academic 

deficiencies of students” (1989, 75). This 

potential pitfall in the method that of product over 

process has shown itself in several ways 

throughout the years of Foxfire‟s development as 

a place-based curricular model. In the first 

instance, the disciplinary skills of former Foxfire 

students placed in supervisory roles in subsequent 

Foxfire projects was found by staff members to 

be lacking. Was the approach to English and 

literature serving to educate in those areas as 

intended? As one observing staff member noted:  

 

Lack of grammatical skills, carelessness, 

being sloppy about her work, not 

checking to make sure that she‟s 

accurate … [But] she was a Foxfire 

student and they‟re trying to maintain a 

commitment to that. I don‟t think she 

would have been given all that leeway if 

she hadn‟t been a Foxfire student. 

(Puckett 1989, 76) 

 

There is additional evidence to suggest concern 

over journalistic creativity, authorship, and 

direction; that is, the model may not have been as 

student-focused as many presumed. One-time 

proponent and board member for the Foxfire 

program, critic Herbert Kohl ultimately posed 

several provocative questions regarding the 

legitimacy of the program. Kohl asked: 

 

Who actually produces the Foxfire 

books? Are they the work of the 

students, who should then take pride of 



12 

 

authorship, or are they reworked 

versions of materials students collected? 

Does the staff of Foxfire and the 

editorial staff of Doubleday do the actual 

writing? … Who makes the decisions at 

Foxfire anyway? (Puckett 1989, 70) 

 

Not insignificantly, Puckett insinuated that Kohl‟s 

eventual discontent with Foxfire may have grown 

out of his failed efforts to involve the 

organization in a local unionization movement. 

What is perhaps more important, is that none of 

these issues are referenced in the place-based 

educational literature. To date, while Foxfire does 

appear on two occasions in two separate volumes, 

a total of five paragraphs in all, the initiative has 

yet to be explored in any depth. It is possible that 

a deeper consideration of Foxfire and off-shoot 

initiatives that have grown from it may serve to 

inform current practice in meaningful ways.  

 

Conclusions and Directions 

While place-based education as a named 

approach to curriculum development appears to 

be a relatively new term, even a cursory 

examination reveals that the fundamental 

principles of the approach have a much deeper 

lineage indeed. By at least the early twentieth 

century, and perhaps much earlier, educators were 

writing often about the value and importance of 

maintaining a commitment to local contexts, the 

student experience, and community engagement, 

three components characteristic of modern place-

based educational initiatives. Although place-

based educators generally recognize some of their 

roots, little in the way of comparative or historical 

research is currently available. This must be 

remedied. Beyond casual considerations of 

several notable antecedents, the writings of John 

Dewey for instance, place-based educational 

researchers have done little to consider linkages 

with other place-conscious thinkers and reform 

efforts historically or across disciplines. Where 

historical consciousness does exist, it is typically 

abbreviated and incomplete. 

It may be the case that place-based 

education is unique primarily in name. Rather 

than a wholly new idea, place-based education‟s 

recent call for a return to the local as the center of 

the educational experience is perhaps the latest 

revisioning of a number of older reform efforts, 

large and small. What is required is a concerted 

effort to move beyond the formal phrase of place-

based education and to consider other educational 

reforms and case illustrations that are 

fundamentally similar. This article is intended to 

initiate that important research agenda. 

There are at least three broad and guiding 

questions relevant to the historical agenda as it 

pertains to place-based curricula. In the first 

place, “What are the historical precedents of 

modern place-based education?” While 

researchers have identified a handful of historical 

antecedents, there is clearly more work to be done 

to this end. Potentially relevant domains include, 

but are not limited to the following: community 

education, outdoor education, service learning, 

challenge education, problem-centered learning, 

and rural education. There are likely other 

initiatives and domains, perhaps the most notable 

of which is the Foxfire program, which 

exemplified place-based learning, yet are not 

necessarily historically affiliated with larger 

reform efforts. The Penn School and the Berry 

Schools are highly relevant as well, and there are 

likely numerous others. The Hampton and 

Tuskegee Institutes and a wide range of 

progressive experimental schools throughout the 

20
th

 century also warrant attention. In addition, 

the work of such thinkers as Ralph Tyler, L. 

Thomas Hopkins, Charles and Frank McMurry, 

Liberty Hyde Bailey, Harold Foght, Ellwood 

Cubberley, Paul Hanna, and L.B. Sharp, among 



13 

 

numerous others, has been largely overlooked in 

any detail in this context, but may deserve 

consideration nonetheless. Scholars must also be 

contentious of international examples of place-

based education in their efforts to explore 

historical precedents.  

A second question to consider pertains to 

the manner in which sociopolitical contexts have 

influenced calls for place-focused pedagogies. In 

other words, “Why have educators looked to the 

local surroundings in their efforts to solve 

educational problems and how have the social, 

political, economic, and cultural contexts in 

which those efforts have grown affected 

outcomes? Do these causes and effects vary and 

why?” In each of three examples provided above, 

place-focused models were adopted to meet the 

needs of underserved communities and students. 

At Penn, a unique educational experiment was 

undertaken in the midst of civil unrest and as a 

means to reconstruct the lives of newly freed 

slaves, specifically the Gullah. For Berry, the 

mission was to provide an educational outlet and 

route to social and economic advancement for 

underserved and isolated Appalachian families for 

whom opportunities were few. Like the support 

that Penn received from philanthropists associated 

with the Port Royal Experiment, curriculum 

resources suggest that Berry enjoyed at least some 

measure of inspiration and support from the 

Country Life Movement. With that in mind, 

Foxfire arguably stands as somewhat of an outlier 

in this instance as it was not directly associated 

with any sort of larger, identifiable social or 

political movement.  Given this particular set of 

cases, then, it appears that motivations for place-

focused educational reforms are not entirely 

unitary. While more investigation is clearly 

warranted, the contexts in which place-based 

reform efforts have come into being are highly 

relevant for the overall historical agenda and 

ultimately contain a great deal of explanatory 

power. 

Lastly, but of no lesser importance, place-

based educators must consider “How past 

experiences with place-focused educational 

initiatives might inform contemporary efforts to 

reform schools?” If place-based education is fast 

becoming a movement, as some have suggested, it 

is doing so with a thoroughly underdeveloped 

historical consciousness. Without mistaking the 

past for the present, it seems reasonable to 

suggest that successes and failures of similar 

reform efforts historically might inform current 

practice in the field. Consider Janyandhan‟s 

(2009) thoughtful engagement with the 

intersections that exist between John Dewey and 

modern PBE initiatives. Addressing what she 

regarded as a tendency of place-based researchers 

to “quote Dewey, somewhat selectively, to 

support their arguments” (2009, 107), Jayanadhan 

moved beyond those more widely cited passages 

from Experience and Education (Dewey 1915) 

and Democracy and Education (Dewey 1916), to 

consider somewhat more obscure works such as 

“Americanism and Localism” (Dewey 1929) and 

The Public and Its Problems (Dewey 1927). More 

significant than Jayanadhan's somewhat wider 

reading was her attempt to clarify multiple 

conceptions of the concept of place in Dewey's 

philosophy of education. More important still was 

Jayanadhan's analysis of the conflict she argued 

Dewey perceived to exist between localism and 

an increasingly mobile society, a conflict with 

direct relevance to contemporary place-based 

educational initiatives. The author remarked: 

 

Dewey, then, is struggling with a 

problem that is seldom articulated in 

place-based education, but which is one 

of its greatest challenges - how to frame 

place-based education for inhabitants of 

a mobile and global society. Both urban 



14 

 

and rural place-based pedagogies tend to 

tacitly assume that the members of the 

community are static and have roots in 

that community - or if not static, they are 

at risk of leaving the community rather 

than arriving … This, to me, is the 

second lesson an analysis of Dewey has 

for a pedagogy of place. (Jayanandhan 

2009, 109) 

 

In addition to her thoughtful consideration of a 

theory of place-based education that pre-dates 

modern efforts, Jayanandhan (2009) demonstrated 

that historical appraisals of theory and practice 

may provide insights for contemporary reformers. 

While anomalous, her work is exemplary of the 

type of reward that an expanded historical 

research agenda, one that more deliberately 

considers that vast range of experience earned by 

our educational predecessors, might provide. 

Recalling the sage advice of Laurel Tanner, it 

may be the case that great “strength lies in our 

experience” (1983, 42). 

  

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