Increasing Environmental Literacy through Place-Based Environmental Education with the use of Interactive Digital Media

By Skye Young, MSI

Scientific Illustrator & Educator
Miami University, Project Dragonfly, DZF
youngsk4@miamioh.edu

Place Based Education (PBE) in Environmental Learning

Target Audience: Formal and informal environmental educators

What are the principles of PBE?

Placed based education (PBE) is founded on a learner-centered education style, with a strong focus on inquiry and interdisciplinary approaches that help facilitate student agency. The "place" in PBE refers to physical environment and ecological context, in addition to broader contexts such as culture, history, politics, and economics(1).

Placed Based Education Principles Infographic credit: Teton Science Schools

The goal of PBE is for students to decide to engross themselves deeper with what they're learning, understanding how different elements of their environment are connected, and therefore to be further engaged with their sense of place in the community. This ultimately gives students the chance to make a meaningful impact in their local community and beyond. PBE uses community as the classroom, giving students the opportunity to learn from local experts. This concept also makes PBE a perfect avenue for environmental education.(2)

How is PBE used in Environmental Education?

The goal of Environmental Education (EE) is sustainability—a harmonic relationship between humans and nature—through learner-centered pedagogy that supports interdisciplinary learning, problem-solving, inquiry, a sense of place, and systems thinking, with aims to make a community impact. Considering the overlapping principles, EE can be considered a form of PBE, though not all PBE is EE. The main difference is that EE does not expand beyond ecological priority (3) (4). PBE can be used to supplement these ecological concepts by furthering the concept of place, incorporating the social and economic contexts around environmental issues.

What are the benefits of PBE in EE?

While Environmental Education holds value on its own, putting environmental issues into a

larger context helps students further understand how they fit into their environment and the impact they can and do have. PBE helps students understand the scientific, economic, cultural, and political history of the land they are on, and how those factors have shaped the environment to its current state.

What is interactive digital media and how can it be used to augment place-based environmental education?

Media 1: Interactive Illustration about interactive digital media

  1. Augmented reality adventures

  2. Virtual reality living history museums

  3. Systems learning (in- or ex- situ)

  4. Digital Installation Art


A simple sample of how an interactive illustration works--use the mouse to explore the illustration. The actual interactive illustration will be about interactive digital media instead of raccoons! Through trial and error, I've also recognized that these work better in a landscape format and through a URL embed rather than HTML embed code. More information will be included on the II subpage

  • What visuals will be incorporated and how will the media engage with the audience?

    1. Through the use of one interactive illustration that connects viewers to links to apps, video previews, and more information about each technology type


Learn More about Interactive Digital Media Used in PBE

Little paragraph to show purpose—fast evolution of technology in education; Pandemic influence to move to virtual learning; Nature deficit disorder (NDD); growing need for sustainability

Viewer Engagement & Tracking

The audio portion will be a podcast episode with some intro music, an introduction of who I am, who my guest is, and a background of augmented reality used in education. I will use platform to host my audio piece that tracks the amount of plays/visits (Podbean).

The interactive illustration I plan on including will by its very nature be engaging and encouraging visual exploration. The illustration will have multiple click points where the viewer will be able to learn more about each type of technology, fit with links to videos and further information. I plan on doing research to see if there's a way I can measure interactivity with the interactive illustration (possibly putting a still image on the website that when clicked will take you to the hosted interactive illustration, through which I will be able to track page visits). So far, it looks as though if I'm hosting it as an Adobe Publish Online, it gives me analytics about the viewers:

Outside Collaborator: Maria Patino (Inter. Ill)

One collaborator I have chosen to work with is Maria Patino, an educator at the Marine Institute of Science. As a result of the pandemic, the education programs at the Marine Institute of Science have largely become virtual. As such, the curriculum used is constantly developing to become more engaging for the students, and they have started using varieties of interactive digital illustrations in their presentations. Maria is also passionate about bringing more place-based material to the curriculum!

Outside Collaborator: Sarah McCormick (AR)

The collaborator I have chosen to work with is Sarah McCormick, a Denver artist/educator currently creating virtual reality place-based educational curriculum for a San Luis Valley school district. I have asked her to do an interview with me to use as part of a podcast episode talking about virtual reality in place-based education to get her firsthand insight and to understand her passion about reaching the students in this community. While her work isn't exclusively for environmental education, the tools and placed-based purpose share the same foundation in creating connection between the students and the land they reside on.

Implications of this Work

  • Encouraging educators to incorporate technologies in an ever-growing field

  • Find ways to further engage this younger generation with the outdoors in a way that helps them create a sense of identity and place

  • Increasing environmental literacy with the goal of increasing eco-positive behaviours

  • Finding a healthy place for technology in nature (implications on NDD?)