The Classroom Isn’t the Only Place for Learning

A new tool from Project Zero researcher Daniel Wilson aims to help educators find new places to teach outside of the classroom. With Designing Learning Paths, educators are asked to consider interesting places in a school’s surrounding neighborhood and how they could be utilized in education.

For years, the Designing Learning Places Lab has studied what makes a good learning environment, work that goes well beyond the traditional classroom. As Wilson explains, “the real magic” of education occurs when there is a triangle connecting three main things: the purpose, or learning goals; the practice of pedagogical strategies; and the place, or environment, where learning takes place.

“There’s this coherency between purpose, practice, and place,” explains Wilson. “So that’s the big idea of the Designing Learning Places Lab. It’s the focus on place and how it relates to purpose and practice.”

The Designing Learning Paths tool asks educators to think about that convergence and focus on four different ways a place can be utilized in education.

Designing Learning Paths 

“This tool is specifically designed for people who are curious about ways to learn outside of a classroom,” Wilson explains. “It’s re-situating knowledge, pushing or nudging educators to reconsider that where knowledge and skills can be built need not be in a classroom. There are these other places where you can learn things.”

The Designing Learning Paths tool shows educators how to evaluate learning places and think of them through four different lenses.

• Learning AT Place: Place as a Setting – The place is a different learning environment than normal, which may inspire but is not directly related to learning goals. For example, a writing class held outside in a garden that gives students a quiet place to write and hold group discussions.
• Learning WITH Place: Place as a Partner – The goal of learning in this place is to collaborate with others who normally use that place, such as going to a garden to help those who work there plant trees and help solve problems they might have.
• Learning OF Place: Place as an Object – The place where learning takes place is the object of study. Learning goals are specific to the place itself and its natural, historical, or cultural qualities, like visiting a garden to study its plants, birds, and insects.
• Learning THROUGH Place: Place as a Bridge – The place itself acts as a medium for acquiring knowledge, with learning goals aiming to have students learn through the objects, concepts, or systems of the place itself. A trip to the local garden in this case might be to study ecosystems, comparing them to a different park or plaza, and connecting that place to larger issues such as climate change.

Once a teacher has considered whether a place should be learned at, with, of, or through, the tool asks educators to think of how the place could support student learning.

“Teachers do this all the time. They try to find places which just might be more comfortable to learn something, and that would be a learning at place,” says Wilson. “Let’s go to the library. It’s designed better for the kinds of things we want to do. Or let’s go outside today, that would be learning at place. Just kind of reminds us that we don’t have to be within four walls to do this.”

Mapping Your Learning

Wilson, also a lecturer at the Ed School, developed the tool as part of a partnership with SEK International Schools in Madrid. One SEK school didn’t turn to online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead, teachers explored their community and found places outside to hold lessons, creating “learning paths” in neighborhoods students could follow to different places. In each location, different parts of the normal curriculum could be taught in an environment that relates to the topic.

“It’s a fantastically different model of what learning could look like. It’s basically saying the role of the classroom in school isn’t to provide the knowledge. You can go find the knowledge at a local automotive shop or an artist’s studio,” Wilson says. “But we have to know the people and develop relationships with those people. And teachers are these brokers in their community, where they design these paths.”

As Wilson noted, the resulting learning paths resemble a subway map of a city, complete with individual stops that offer unique learning opportunities that reflect the school’s traditional curriculum. Wilson says the tool is “highly resonant” with many place-based learning ideas that have developed in recent years.

“Place-based learning is a pedagogical strategy that’s been around for several decades.” Wilson notes. “This gives a little sharper language to place-based learning. It’s not just a place, it’s actually, what are we doing with the place?”