Place-Based Education: Fieldtrips and Local History

This topic is about place-based education as it refers to specific lessons, field trips, and learning local history in place. One of the critiques of the below video is that there is not enough local indigenous history and language (with the single word that was used being from a neighbouring dialect); however, that is because much of the indigenous language is ‘sleeping.’ While I discussed the reason for some of this lack of knowledge, I did a disservice by not discussing the difficult truth that the Pentlach people had two genocides committed against them within a very quick period of time. First, the introduction of smallpox killed many people. Secondly, a neighbouring indigenous nation annihilated every man, woman, and child they came across as part of a cycle of revenge, village burning, and slave-taking.

Still, there was a time limit on this video and I had much to cover.

Rathtrevor Beach is a provincial park on Vancouver Island. This is a video of how I would use this beach as a place of learning.

This video was a lot of hard work, but I am becoming much more confident in video-editing from it. As an educator, we need to use as much technology as we possibly can when we feel comfortable with it.

This lesson though and reviewing and looking at my peer’s videos within the program, taught me a series of ways to utilize place, make inter-curricular content and lessons, and express a holistic place-based approach to local history.