Going back and beyond: Children's learning through places

Fostering students’ connections for places beyond their own locality and for both rural and urban environments may enhance their environmental learning

This theoretical paper draws on letters written by elementary school children living in rural areas of Canada almost a century ago. In 1919, the British Columbia Department of Education established an Elementary Correspondence (EC) school for children living in remote areas of the province and with difficult access to school. Letters to their teachers were a critical part of their formal education. The researcher/author of this paper read over 1000 letters written from 1929 to 1940 by children and their families who were enrolled in the EC school. This paper addresses the concept of place as reflected in these letters and discusses the concept in relation to place-based education (PBE) and the role of nature in the children’s conceptualization of place.

PBE focuses on place as the context for promoting environmental learning and has, at times, presented natural and rural environments in romanticized ways. An analysis of the children’s letters warrants a re-thinking of the rural-urban divide over time and space. The letters indicated that the EC school became a place as important in children’s learning as their local environments. The letters connected the rural places and natural environments in which the children lived with the urban world of the EC school.

Correspondence with the EC teachers about such urban places as Victoria and Vancouver influenced how children and their families interpreted and found meaning in their local places and themselves. The letters often compared the children’s own rural locality to the conditions of the city. Children’s letters also reflected a world where adults did not necessarily play a central role in promoting children’s learning. The children often helped their parents work the land, but also spent a lot of time exploring their natural environments on their own. While many children enjoyed their natural surroundings, they also described the places where they lived as being isolated, limiting, harsh, and precarious. Some of the children expressed a desire to be ‘there,’ in an urban school where they could have face-to-face interactions with teachers and classmates.

Children’s experience of place as both local and non-local calls into question an uncritical celebration of rural nature over urban non-nature. Such dichotomy impedes a more accurate understanding of the roles that multiple places play in children’s learning and relationships with their environments. Reflections on children’s relation to place almost 100 years ago can provide some guidance for environmental educators today. Fostering students’ connections for places beyond their own locality and for both rural and urban environments may enhance their environmental learning.