Each Flipped Learning Module (FLM) is a set of short videos and online activities that can be used (in whole or in part) to free up class time from content delivery for greater student interaction. At the end of the module, students are asked to fill out a brief survey, in which we adopt the minute paper strategy. In this approach, students are asked to submit their response to two brief questions regarding their knowledge of the module.
In this FLM, students are asked to view four videos, and engage in three online activities that focus on the preparation for visiting a site, on-site tasks, team collaboration and utilizing data from observations.
Key Terms
place-based learning, local communities, reflection, safety, note-taking, observations
Module Overview
- Before You Go
- What is Place-based learning?
- Reflecting Before Adventure
- Safety at Sites
- On Site
- Sites as Text
- Notetaking at Various Sites and Event Types
- Teamwork in and outside the Classroom
- Collaborating at Sites
- Sharing Observations in the Classroom
- Reading and Writing about Place
- Combining Observations with Reading/Textual Research
- Writing About Place in Major Assignments
Download Video Transcripts
Video 1: Before You Go
Place-based learning Online Activity 1
Pre-Reflection
Use the following guiding questions to write a brief reflection before the visit.
- What do you expect the place (site, neighborhood, performance space) you will be visiting might look (sound, feel, smell) like?
- If you are attending an event or a performance, what kinds of sensory experiences do you expect will be most central and why?
- What kinds of past experiences have you had with the kind of site or event? How might this affect your interaction with it?
- What kinds of expectations do you have for the people or animals you may encounter at this site? How might they behave?
- How might course readings or other work you have done in the class prepare you for your experiences at this place or event? What connections do you think will be possible to draw between your course readings and your experience there?
Video 2: On Site
Place-based learning Online Activity 2
Crafting a Template for Your Observation Notes
Before the event/visit, answering the following questions can help you to develop an organized structure for notes while allowing for flexibility.
- Consider what contexts are most relevant for your notes. Where, when and for what purpose are you going where you’re going? What is the name of the place/site, speaker, event, performance, you will be experiencing? Where can you note this key initial information on your template?
- Once you have the more general information from question 1, develop a more precise understanding of further details related to the place and your presence in it. Will you be mostly stationary or will you be moving around? From what specific locations will you be observing?
- What are the factors that shape your sequence or manner of interactions with the place or event? (these factors may be related to the event itself, rules at the site, and/or directions from your instructor.) How can you design a template that can effectively organize your observations given these possibilities?
- After developing a more specific understanding of the place, consider how you can structure your template to prepare for the rhythms or intervals of time that will affect your experience, whether they are shaped by the place/event itself or directions you have received. How and when can you note clock time efficiently if necessary without taking yourself out of the experience?
- Thinking about what you know about the event/site or rereading your pre-reflection, consider how your expectations might be met or challenged. In your template how will you create space for the unexpected? What strategies can you use to link observations as potential connections occur to you?
Video 3: Teamwork in and outside the Classroom
Place-based learning Online Activity 3
After you return from your outside-the-classroom experience and before you return to class, read through your notes to prepare for discussions in class.
- Write down or highlight points in the notes that document moments you found particularly surprising or striking.
- Formulate and write questions about what you observed.
- Move through your whole set of notes and write any patterns or trends you identify that you think may be significant.
- Write notes about how your observations may be related to other course materials and previous class discussions.
Video 4: Reading and Writing about Place
Place-based learning Online Activity 4
Focusing back on your notes, find material that you highlighted for the previous online and in-class activities to brainstorm a working question and claim for your upcoming place-based argument.
- Consider how some of the points you chose as particularly surprising or striking could suggest a trend on which you could focus a question and claim.
- Look through the initial questions you formulated and consider whether any of them or a combination of them could be shaped into a question that could lead to a claim.
- Look back at your notes about course materials and choose a specific quotation or central concept that you think you could respond to through a question and claim focused on details from your observations.
Place-based learning Survey
Please answer the following two questions, and submit the responses to your instructor.
- What was the one most important thing you learned from this module?
- Do you have any unanswered questions for me?
Place-based learning In-Class Activity: Option 1
Generating Potential Questions from Observations
- After you get into groups, one of you should make a Google doc through his or her BU email account and then share that doc with your group members and your instructor.
- All group members should share the highlights from their notes that they prepared in the online activity.
- In your Group Google doc, work together to come up with five different questions that could lead to potential claims / arguments. Work together as a group to discuss, develop, and refine each of the five questions.
Download Worksheet 1
Download Digital Implementation of the Activity
Place-based learning In-Class Activity: Option 2
Evaluating Questions and Claims Based on Observations
As a group, read through your five finished questions from the in-class activity introduced after the previous video. Choose one that you think is the most likely to lead to a strong, arguable claim. Copy and paste that question to the Class Google doc that your instructor will share with all the groups.
As you read through the posted questions in the Class Google doc, use your original Group Google doc to respond to each of the other groups’ questions through the exercise below.
- Are you fairly sure you understand the question or are there aspects that seem unclear? Is there phrasing that could be revised to make a clearer question?
- Using the question as originally phrased (and not your revision if you created one) collaborate to develop a working claim based on course topics for a paper of the length that you have been assigned. Look at your working claim and figure out a counterargument you would need to acknowledge.
– If you have extreme difficulty developing an arguable claim and cannot do so, write a few sentences explaining why coming up with a claim was difficult. Was it due to the structure of the question? What aspects of the structure? The content of the question? Some other reason?
- What strategy / strategies for developing questions and claims do you notice from the process of looking at each question and creating (or not creating!) each claim.
Move through the rest of the questions in the Class Google doc and respond to the three questions above for each one.
- On your own, return to your working question and claim and evaluate it based on the criteria and strategies the class discovered through this in-class activity.
Download Worksheet 2
Download Digital Implementation of the Activity
References
Deric Shannon and Jeffery Galle “Where We Are: Place, Pedagogy, and the Outer Limits.” D. Shannon, J. Galle (eds.), Interdisciplinary Approaches to Pedagogy
and Place-Based Education, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-50621-0_1 (2017)
