The Promise of Place (2014) website (an American based resource developed for the international PBE community) identified several obstacles for teachers attempting to implement PBE. These can be summarized as follows:
• Teachers and administrators not knowing how PBE addresses educational standards;
• Funding for and commitment to PBE projects fluctuating from year to year, and administration to (new) administration;
• Lack of administrative support;
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• Perception of PBE as time consuming;
• Teachers not comfortable in outdoor classroom settings; and
• Community associations and other groups not aware of the role they can play in PBE.
Several of the teachers interviewed in this study identified with the challenges listed above and will be further discussed in the following section.
Christchurch, New Zealand
Lisa said that while she was committed to using PBE, a range of challenges prevented her from doing so, “Planning it, bringing it together, getting students to buy into it … Planning what you’ve got at the time and planning what you’re going to be doing there and then getting relief. You can’t take 29 students by yourself. You should take two other teachers.”
She said that even if she arranged such education for those times of year when other teachers were most likely to have the time available to join her, “It would be goodwill on the part of other teachers across the school to do that.” Limited finances, in particular, stymie education outside of the classroom. She explained that the costs of having herself and two other approved teachers amounted to $600 a day ($200 per teacher). The extent to which PBE outside of school relies on support from teachers and colleagues within the school is evident here.
For Mark, one of the biggest challenges he faced when trying to provide PBE was a lack of time (a matter elaborated on in the next chapter). He added:
I don’t get to our local marae enough. I don’t go to the city enough, even though it’s broken. I should be walking the streets with the students so we can talk and discuss
107 their city. I value place-based education. However, I don’t practise it enough. On reflection it [the inability to teach in a place-based way] is hard to swallow.
As Mark and Lisa are in more conventional school settings than most of the other research participants, many of them share different challenges. The next section discusses some of the difficulties faced by research participants in Saskatoon in implementing tenets of PBE, beginning with challenges in dealing with administration.
Saskatoon, Canada
According to Steve and Janet, school administrators have tended to mistrust teachers working outside of the classroom for a variety of reasons (e.g. financial accountability).
Administrators have complained that they do not always know where such teachers are. They also tend to have difficulty determining how the programme works within the school’s schedule and taking it into account within that schedule. Steve stated that each time his school appointed a new administrator, he and other teachers involved with the programme had to “educate” them about how PBE works. They also, he alleged, “had to renegotiate the number of students, finances for the programme, timetables and other proposal items.”
Malcolm also experienced lack of support from fellow teachers and some (thus, not all) administrators:
[When we’re] talking to some of our staff, they say, “Yeah, it’s a good programme, but it doesn’t fit into our school.” What school would it fit into then? I think it’s a hard adjustment, more so ... for the school, to expect us to integrate … We’ve also had to educate our administration team as well, and we’ve been blessed with some administrative members who’ve been supportive in giving us a lot of freedom. We’ve
108 also had administrative members who’ve been very critical, [but] we welcome that because it strengthens our argument and it strengthens our programme ... It’s been a challenge to bring in a new classroom within a traditional system ... But it’s been getting better.
Like Lisa, Don touched on the high costs associated with taking students away from the school. He said that financial limitations play such a pivotal role in this regard that “they can counter your drive to head outside.” He added he had tried to resolve the problem by taking his students outside but staying on the school grounds. Another option, he noted, would be take advantage of any outdoor education programmes or spaces on offer paid for by the school board. This is another matter I pick up on later in this chapter. Costs are one of challenges research participants have faced in implementing PBE and critical pedagogy of place. These are summarized in following section.
Recurring themes and points of difference
Some of the research participants in this study encountered fewer barriers to using PBE than others because they were working in schools or could access programmes that had already developed this form of education. This embedding of PBE meant that scheduling, administrative support and financial assistance were part of regular school practice. As such, teachers and administrators expected education outside the classroom to take place and were comfortable about that aspect of learning. The challenges that were expressed by the research participants aligned very well with those as pointed out through the Promise of Place website.
This exemplifies that two locations using PBE outside the United States also have challenges associated with mainstream schooling. This could be a case that the colonial schooling system found in the United States could have similarities to those of Canada and New
109 Zealand. Although this is not looked at in this thesis there could be room to add a third case to this study.
For both Lisa and Mark, their schools (Tī kōuka and Harakeke, respectively) were still operating within traditional schooling structures, although the two teachers’ PBE-related efforts were pushing against the boundaries imposed by those structures. Lisa and Mark said that the challenge was not one of lacking freedom to use aspects of PBE but rather one of fiscal and time constraint. Their predicament is probably the same for many teachers in mainstream schools trying to incorporate PBE into their teaching.
One interesting matter not addressed by any of the research participants concerns the compliance issues associated with taking students away from school. According to Haddock (2007), many teachers engaged in outdoor education in New Zealand said one of the main reasons preventing them and their peers from taking students off school grounds is the need to fill out too many forms. Utilizing the community both within and beyond the school grounds is an important part of PBE and is discussed in the following section.
This section has touched upon some of the challenges the research participants have been faced with in implementing PBE. These, and other challenges that confronted them, are examined further in the following chapters as they relate to time and space (Chapter Five) and curriculum and assessment (Chapter Six).
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