By Meg Mobley, OSU Dept. of Crop and Soil Science
I have been reading about place-based approaches to teaching for a while and have dabbled with them while designing and teaching my general education natural science courses. I’m interested in the potential for these approaches to encourage students to build on their own prior knowledge and experiences and to connect basic science concepts to broader contexts. However, I rarely find the opportunity to ask students what works (or doesn’t) and why.
Thus, I am quite excited about a recent opportunity to join a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) research cohort related to “Learning on Location” (LOL). Specifically, I get to be part of a multi-institutional and interdisciplinary team exploring the student perspectives on location-based learning experiences. Here I’ll share a bit about my experience of the first (of three) week-long intensives that I attended in July, and a bit about the motivation and approach my team is taking to our research.
Learning on Location
In her book by the same name, Ashley Holmes, OSU’s associate vice provost for teaching and learning, defines “Learning on Location” (LOL) as an approach that “centers place-making and leverages critical engagement with locations … deepening student learning by rooting their experience within place” (Holmes, 2023). Place-based learning (PBL) is probably the most widely known approach to LOL (Yemini et al., 2023). However, my team wants to consider location-based learning experiences that did not necessarily meet all the criteria of PBL, including lab-based learning, internships, and field experiences. We envision LOL encompassing a spectrum of location-centered approaches that include varying levels of “place-making” such as cultural immersion, critical reflection, and/or tangible interaction with the location. Thus, in our conception of LOL we are including lab, clinical, experiential, service learning—really any intentional academic learning activities that (1) occur in a location that is not a conventional in-person or online classroom, and (2) connect what is being learned to the context of the location in some way.
The Seminar
The Center for Engaged Learning (CEL) at Elon University launches a new two-year SoTL research seminar every year. Past topics have included “Writing Beyond the University,” “Integrating Global Learning with the University Experience,” and “Affirming and Inclusive Engaged Learning for Neurodivergent Students,” among many other research seminars. Each seminar consists of three-to-five research teams who get together at Elon over three summers to design, carry out, and present the results of a SoTL research project related to the seminar topic. For 2025 to 2027, the topic is “Learning on Location,” the seminar is co-led by Ashley Holmes, and the teams are conducting research on student, faculty, and institutional perspectives on what makes Learning on Location work.
This was not a conference! This was an intensive, team-based, SoTL research “boot camp”! The rough schedule: Sunday – arrive and meet your team; Monday – write your research question; Tuesday – write your methods; Wednesday – write your two-year plan; Thursday – revise it all based on feedback; Friday – collapse!
Luckily, my cohort and leaders are a fantastic group of human beings who are excited about teaching and learning and who are empathetic, self-aware, and flexible enough to navigate the variety of personality types and the waxing and waning of individuals’ attention and energy throughout a long week. Monitoring my own energy levels and attitudes throughout the week got me thinking a lot about what we are asking students (and faculty) to do with interdisciplinary teamwork in our new Seeking Solutions courses – how hard it is and how transformative! But that’s another topic that you can talk to me about later.
The Research
My team includes 5 faculty and 1 practicing architect from institutions spanning across Canada and the US (literally from Pacific to Atlantic time zones). We represent the disciplines of environmental science, business, architecture, art, disability studies, and biochemistry. Hence our approach to studying “student perspectives” is necessarily an interdisciplinary approach. We are employing qualitative research methods across multiple “cases”, with each case being a location-based in-person or online course or internship experience at our respective institutions. Our research goal is to elicit from students how LOL activates and connects not just the cognitive, but also the affective, psychomotor, and even spiritual, domains of Bloom’s learning taxonomy (Centre for Teaching Excellence, n.d.; LaFever, 2016).
Thanks for perusing my quick share-out about Learning on Location and the CEL Research Seminar experience. I’m happy to chat further with anyone interested in applying some of these location-centered approaches in your teaching, in sharing your experience with some of these approaches as teacher or learner, in applying to one of these research seminars in the future, or in talking about interdisciplinary teamwork in Seeking Solutions or adjacent courses.
References
Centre for Teaching Excellence. (n.d.). Bloom’s taxonomy. University of Waterloo. https://uwaterloo.ca/centre-for-teaching-excellence/catalogs/tip-sheets/blooms-taxonomy
Holmes, A. J. (2023). Learning on location: Place-based approaches for diverse learners in higher education. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003445678
LaFever, M. (2016). Switching from Bloom to the Medicine Wheel: Creating learning outcomes that support Indigenous ways of knowing in post-secondary education. Intercultural Education, 27(5), 409–424. https://doi.org/10.1080/14675986.2016.1240496
Yemini, M., Engel, L., & Ben Simon, A. (2023). Place-based education – a systematic review of literature. Educational Review, 77(2), 640–660. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131911.2023.2177260
About the author: Meg Mobley is a senior instructor II in the Dept. of Crop and Soil Science at Oregon State University. She teaches soil science; her courses range from general education courses to advanced undergrad/grad courses and include on-campus, hybrid, and online modalities. Meg uses location-based approaches in her courses, especially general education science courses. In addition to teaching, she also serves as a Faculty Fellow with the Center for Teaching and Learning, supporting faculty development related to teaching and learning in OSU’s new general education curriculum, particularly the Seeking Solutions category.
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