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This study presents two U.S. school development projects aimed at building leadership capacity for continuous school development that attempts to use “evidence-based” ideas from the standpoint of education values and understandings with a renewed sensitivity to culturally diverse students in South Carolina schools. The Lowcountry Educator Initiative (LEI) uses a professional development program designed for educators from various schools. School Improvement through Improvement Science (SITIS), stems from a larger university-school partnership initiative that includes other institutions around the United States. The two projects serve as compelling examples that push on the limited scope that federal and local policy requirements place on educational institutions to provide evidence of improvements that lead to educational success. This work offers qualitative evidence that honors, recognizes, and leverages the strengths of the participants’ contexts to facilitate improvement in practice. The projects implemented offer evidence for (1) providing leadership support for school improvement efforts, (2) the use of local context in improving practice, and (3) the valuing of various data to engage in locally-relevant and appropriate work. We recommend centering the local context and improvement science approaches in research design, research funding, and educator preparation.

School gardens offer culturally relevant learning opportunities for engaging children and youth in applying science and engineering to solving real-life challenges, helping teachers meet the needs of all students, including underrepresented minorities. Consistent with the Next Generation Science Standards, gardening experiences provide opportunities for students to explore topics that integrate science and engineering in depth over extended periods of time. Science in the Learning Gardens (SciLG), described in this chapter, is a middle school curriculum project that was pilot tested at two middle schools that serve predominantly low-income and ethnic and racial minority students. The curriculum provides holistic, integrated, hands-on, project-based and place-based learning experiences and embedded formative assessments.

School gardens are considered non-formal learning settings and a source of experiential learning and have been used to teach core academic subjects such as science, history, art, language, and mathematics in a hands-on, experiential learning environment. More recently, some schools have promoted school gardens as outreach programs intended to help underprivileged citizens. The author reports on a study which explored how school gardens involved in urban garden initiatives addressed the issue of social justice. Findings indicate that the urban garden initiative started with a school garden and moved outward into the community. Students were empowered, as well as the school’s extended community through good nutrition, the experience of successfully growing food, and the relationships formed in the process. In addition to fostering environmental stewardship and community building, the school garden program addressed the issue of hunger and poverty within and beyond the school walls and into the wider community. Environmental stewardship, food security, youth empowerment, and proper nutrition are some outcomes of this urban agriculture initiative.

This chapter discusses why place-responsiveness is an important consideration for outdoor environmental educators. Understanding the philosophical and pedagogical foundations of place provides insights into what has driven the rise of place-based education. Building upon this, the chapter looks at how outdoor educators have developed place-responsive approaches that allow them and their students to connect to outdoor landscapes.

This chapter examines how an interdisciplinary high-impact practice approach to teaching and learning using selected contested monuments can reveal intersections of racism, colonialism, and sexism, and lay the foundation for students’ civic engagement. In place-based and virtual experiences, students observe and investigate local and national monuments, integrating knowledge from multiple disciplines, including history, psychology, art, culture, and tourism. Students make critical analyses about how monuments reveal power relationships in our society. Students from various disciplines explore the origin of contested monuments, the evolving national and local debates around them, and their effect on students’ learning to evaluate historical, contemporary, and cultural perspectives while developing their own supported opinions to nurture civic engagement and lifelong learning.

This chapter studies the impact of the recent multicultural approach to comparative legal studies on comparative law teaching, with a focus on British debates and literature. I will argue that the multicultural turn of (comparative) legal teaching, reflected for example in a greater diversity of teaching techniques, a greater emphasis on minority issues and law &… disciplines, responds to a multiplicity of motivations. Pedagogically, it is a response to the increasingly diverse backgrounds of students and their differing intellectual starting-points. Pragmatically, it is a means to boost students’ employability and intellectual versality in a job market that now values “cultural awareness skills”. Finally, conceptually, it is a tool designed to unravel the pluralistic nature of law. From these diverse drivers to the multicultural turn in (comparative) legal teaching, it is possible to identify similarities with other recent trends of globalisation and internationalisation of legal education. However, this article will submit that differences remain. Having analysed these differences, I will go on to argue and reveal that in them lie the core features of a multicultural approach to legal teaching and its intrinsic connections to comparative law, as the multicultural classroom itself becomes a comparative law site.

Place-based education (PBE) has long been recognized as a high-impact educational practice. It embeds learning in a multi-sensory context that nurtures active, praxis-driven, interdisciplinary, and collaborative learning. More recently, educators have begun to utilize digital media and virtual reality technologies in ways that seem to parallel PBE. Using phenomenological concepts, especially following Edmund Husserl and Alfred Schutz, this chapter explores what the parallels and differences might be between physical and virtual places, ontologically as well as in its pedagogical role in PBE. It also attempts to interpret the other chapters of the book in light of the philosophical implications.

The term neogeography describes a new approach within GIScience teaching and research whereby geospatial technologies are becoming web-based and increasingly accessible to a broad range of developers and users. Through engaging with the geoweb (geospatial web-based applications), users are creating maps and sharing spatial data that is relevant to their own lives and experiences. The development of geoweb tools has been especially important for students and faculty members who engage in the practice of participatory mapping. In this chapter we describe how, in a university taught neogeography course, undergraduate students created participatory geoweb applications to address local issues. One student constructed a geoweb-based platform for civic dialogue; a second team of students designed and deployed an application to address the logistical challenges faced by a local grassroots organization. We draw on the pedagogic theory of place-based education (PBE) and consider it as an effective approach to teaching and learning neogeography. We observed how a PBE approach empowered students to critically and effectively engage in civic matters, become more invested in ‘place’ and actively learn directly about social justice issues. The approach also supported an increased academic engagement while providing a valuable learning experience in terms of developing technical, critical thinking and other soft skills.

While the need to internationalize teacher education is recognized by scholars/practitioners, little attention is paid to the role of policy/policy-makers in supporting this endeavor. This chapter focuses on the enactment of Ontario’s K-12 international education strategy by four key policy actors: the Ontario Ministry of Education, the College of Teachers, School Boards and Faculties of Education in realizing (or not) the internationalization of teacher preparedness. A siloed approach, conflict in policy messaging, overlooked policy alignments and weak policy framing result in diminishing the relevance and importance of internationalization of teacher preparedness to meet Ontario’s international education objectives.

In this chapter, we turn to Nxumalo’s (International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 29(5): 640–654, 2016) ‘refiguring presences’ to attend to and trouble absent presences (e.g. curriculum of Land as settler property and economic resource) and present absences (e.g. Indigenous resurgence) that shape response-able possibilities of engaging Indigenous and place-based education. From this orientation, we consider: (a) the Western modernist nature/culture binary and (b) Indigenous forms of storying place to generate new analytic questions, types of findings, and possibilities for representing knowledge claims. Next, we provide glances at our place(d) stories of (re)learning to listen to and be taught by human, natural, and spirit worlds in relation with/in a month-long graduate-level summer institute in Lamas, Peru. Lastly, we discuss how Indigenous relational ontologies—with deep roots in living places and spiritual practices—enhanced our understanding of their role in reimagining pedagogy, practice, and research in higher education. We conclude with a call to labour the shared and divergent spaces between Indigenous and new materialist approaches to challenge (neo-)colonial logics and relationships, as well as enhance commensurate commitments and projects.

This chapter will describe a successful place-based marine outreach programme based on a combination of marine science, traditional knowledge, education and community engagement. Strong links to the seven Ocean Literacy Principles are also a feature of this program. The two bays in the chapter title, Port Phillip and Western Port, are located close to southern Australian City of Melbourne. These two water bodies support a diverse range of habitats and provide many environmental, social and economic benefits to the local community. And yet, the vast majority of Melbournians are unaware of the ways in which their lives are linked to these two bays, its deep-time history and, more generally, they are unaware of their connections to the ocean. Over the past 12 years, the Two Bays project has evolved to address this awareness issue and to develop and encourage deeper collaboration and knowledge sharing. A second theme of this chapter relates to the sailing vessel so critical to the Two Bays project and briefly details the ways in which a small group of dedicated individuals forged a shared vision, followed through on that vision and maintained it for 20 years. The subject of that vision is a 63-foot-long catamaran called Pelican 1. This ocean-going vessel was designed and built as a platform for marine science, community engagement and education. Having sailed 70,000 nautical miles on journeys of discovery, Pelican 1 has been an effective advocate for marine environmental awareness, social justice and sustainable use of the ocean.