Bringing School to Life - by Sarah K Anderson (Paperback)

About the Book

Bringing School to Life: Place-Based Education across the Curriculum offers insights into how to build a program across the K-8 grades. Anderson addresses key elements such as mapping, local history, citizen science, and integrated curricula. She suggests strategies for buildi...

Book Synopsis

Bringing School to Life: Place-Based Education across the Curriculum offers insights into how to build a program across the K-8 grades. Anderson addresses key elements such as mapping, local history, citizen science, and integrated curricula. She suggests strategies for building community partnerships and implementation for primary grades.

Review Quotes

Anderson re-centers place-based education as an anecdote to a distracted and disconnected world. She shares stories and strategies that will inspire educators and give us all a sense of hope for the future. This should be required reading for all teachers!

Bringing School to Life provides powerful research, strategies, and stories for every K-8 administrator and teacher. Through her book, Anderson challenges educators to implement pedagogical practices that seek to sustain the world in which we live through place-based education.

In my work with K-16 educators across the U.S., and around the world, I regularly feature Sarah Anderson's compelling work with her students. She grasps both the visionary and the practical aspects of place based education as few educators I know. Bringing Life to School charts a path in the most concrete terms for connecting students to their communities in deep and meaningful ways. Every educator should dig deeply into this book. Our students deserve it.

Sarah Anderson brings to this volume over a decade of experience as a place-based education teacher and then curriculum coordinator. What she shares is the result of continuous experimentation and self-evaluation. Bringing Life to School: Place-Based Education Across the Curriculum will provide both newcomers to place-based education and veteran practitioners a wealth of lesson and project ideas aimed at deepening students' relationship to and responsibility for their home communities and beyond.

The examples Anderson provides in this book demonstrate real life evidence that place-based education incites real change in schools, including how to modify activities according to different age groups (pp. 1-45). In this way, I would argue that this book works as a practical manual for teachers seeking to implement place-based curriculum in their classrooms. . . this text provides an extensive array of examples as an attempt to further the use of place-based education in charter schools.

What a useful book! In her powerful narrative of how students at the Cottonwood School find and share the stories of their home place, Sarah Anderson will help us find our way towards a more true, democratic and useful model of schooling.

About the Author

Sarah Anderson taught middle school humanities for several years before becoming the fieldwork and place-based education coordinator at The Cottonwood School of Civics and Science in Portland, Oregon. Recently she has been helping teachers from around the Pacific Northwest design place-based education curriculum for their classrooms.