- Place based education emphasises the connection between a learning process and the physical place in which teachers and students are located. This is mainly to ensure connectivity to local contexts, cultures and environments. - PBE is the umbrella term for any locally driven, community based or ecologically focused education. - PBE embraces a citizenship and civic modality where students are able to identify and act on issues in their local areas. It's seen as a way to foster environmental citizens. - Four dimensions of PBE - Biophysical - basic physical context - Psychological - unique experience of each individual - Socio-cultural - refers to a person as part of a certain society and culture - Political-economic - political and economic processes that shape place and people's attitude to it - Five characteristics of PBE - Focus of learning in a specific place from which students learn about wider and more distant fields of knowledge - Students create rather than consume knowledge - Students decide what to learn and teacher takes a more of a guiding role - Interests and questions from students influence the material - Aim to break the boundaries between classroom and community - Challenges in PBE - Seen as controversial and disrupting of many traditional school models - Implementation requires time, effort and resources - Community needs to get involved. Parents, local businesses and any other adults need to be active participants - Some critics of PBE argue that it actually makes people more selfish and separates local and global and micro and macro systems. This can potentially ignore diversity within and across communities. - This paper analyses around 150 studies on PBE implementations and tries to draw themes and learnings from it - A good amount of PBE implementations are focused on improving students' environmental awareness. Around 20% of the studies placed academic achievements and individual learning outcomes as the critical aspects of PBE. - More than 60% of the studies focused on the role of the teachers with many of them seeing them as guides and mediators, facilitators, link between school and community and knowledge providers. - PBE in many places was delivered by NGOs as well as for profit agencies. - The schooling environment in many systems is not conducive to PBE. As more systems are globally governed, there is less and less space for PBE. Innovations are occurring because of individual teacher champions and partnerships with external actors. - The data is largely concentrated to US and is not geographically diverse. It is particularly skewed towards the Global North and English-speaking systems. ---- Miri Yemini, Laura Engel & Adi Ben Simon (2025) Place-based education – a systematic review of literature, Educational Review, 77:2, 640-660, DOI: 10.1080/00131911.2023.2177260