Developing sense of place through a place-based Indigenous education for sustainable development curriculum

Abstract

The life experiences of Indigenous students are often overlooked in school learning, thereby causing dissonance in learning. To address this issue, this study incorporated local and traditional ecological knowledges of community in this year-long course of ‘place-based Indigenous education for sustainable development’, using place-based design principles, which provided many experiential learning opportunities for the students to develop cognitive, socio-emotional, and behavioral aspects of sense of place. To ensure self-determination of Indigenous peoples in educational research, this study engaged and empowered knowledgeable Elders, community members, and Indigenous teachers in this community-based participatory design research. From student worksheets, student interviews, classroom observations, and teacher feedback, we found that students began to think about hometown and its sustainability issues in a broader perspective as they enhanced their local knowledge and sense of place. Follow-up research can be conducted to determine the generalizability of this model in cross-cultural contexts or for Indigenous youth, as the notion of sense of place is rather holistic and contextualized.

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