“I am being told to stick to the program, like I am supposed to ignore everything going on around me,” a fourth-grade teacher replied over the phone in response to my question about the expectations for teaching and learning at her school. Her school was a partner school where I previously worked as a teacher and conducted research with its educators and staff members before the COVID-19 pandemic. Although the fourth-grade teacher commended her colleagues for their efforts in modifying the pace, activities, and assessments within all unit plans across subject areas, she was troubled that this planning process did not acknowledge the COVID-19 pandemic and its material and social impact on the school’s neighborhood. The acknowledgement of the pandemic was primarily reflected in the physical safety routines and procedures at the school.

The disregard of the COVID-19 pandemic within the instructional programming of the school was especially troubling given its geographic location. The school is situated within a neighborhood that various well-known news presses and social media outlets framed as the “epicenter of the epicenter” at the early stages of the pandemic in the U.S. At one time, this neighborhood had the highest rate of deaths due to COVID-19 with understaffed and underresourced hospitals. Even after the rate of infections waned in the neighborhood, many of its residents continued to experience severe food shortages, unemployment, and housing instability. A significant portion of this group of residents were undocumented immigrants who had lost their jobs without access to government relief programs. Members of the school were exposed to the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the neighborhood when they walked outdoors during various times within school hours and saw massive lines of people waiting their turn to receive groceries from the food pantry program, which was run in the school’s small cafeteria.

In fact, the fourth-grade teacher mentioned the food pantry program as she further discussed the urgency to make her pedagogy and curricula relevant to the recovery efforts during the pandemic: “My school has a food pantry program based here. That’s great, but they are framed as totally separate. But learning and teaching are connected to living well too!” After disclosing my impression about her desire to partner with the food pantry program, the fourth-grade teacher gave a loud “yes!” over the phone and decided to gradually embed food pantry initiatives and food insecurity as focal topics in her units across multiple subject areas. Following this initial conversation, this educator began to utilize math units as opportunities for her students to analyze and generate information about food pantries across the neighborhood. One outcome of such work was students creating graphs and maps to highlight the location of food pantries, peak times for distribution, and amount of food resources per site around their neighborhood.

A spotlight on place-based inquiry and study

Memories of this fourth-grade teacher’s frustrations and responses to the disconnect between students’ COV1D-19 daily realities and learning experiences in classrooms emphasize the importance of situating schools as places that are interconnected with the histories, social relations, and issues outside their walls. The disjuncture that the fourth-grade teacher and her students witnessed between their everyday experiences and how they were supposed to teach and learn is not new. Many researchers (e.g., McKittrick, 2006; Sojoyner, 2017; Thomson, 2007) have discussed how schools have continuously operated as sites of enclosure that ignore their relation with broader cultural, racial, and economic processes. Patel (2016) notes how, by ignoring what happens outside of school, schools often expect students to acquire and conform to dominant and deficit-based forms of knowledge, behaviors, and relations in society.

Such research also reveals how schools can be sites of hope, transformation, and possibility by resituating the importance of place in education. Through Tuck’s and McKenzie’s (2014) relational understanding of place, we can think of places – in this case, schools – as manifestations of history and geography. In such a way, what happens inside and outside of school influences teaching and learning in classrooms. For instance, with regard to the focal school, students, staff members, administrators, and educators were made aware of the food pantry program through various ways. If they did not pass the line of residents waiting to receive food assistance as they walked into the school building, they were reminded of the program through newsletters and announcements. On the days when these newsletters and announcements were made through the school’s public address system, the fourth-grade students asked questions about the program to their teacher in the middle of lessons. According to the fourth-grade teacher, these questions were incessant before she started to frame the topics of food instability and support programs as part of the curricula.

Although the fourth-grade students had similar viewpoints about the purpose and merits of food public support programs, they also had varied understandings and experiences with food justice initiatives based on their social identifications, such as race, ethnicity, class, and gender. By foregrounding the importance of place, educators can cultivate learning experiences that allow students to grasp essential concepts and skills across disciplines through the careful study and reflective practice of how their physical, political, and cultural surroundings shape their identities, relationships, and worldviews. As part of this critical examination of place, students can take individual and collective actions to contest social, material, and physical consequences of societal inequities. This work entails a layered, historical, and comprehensive approach toward honoring the different ways in which groups of people experience the social and material effects of inequities, such as food insecurity during the COVID-19 pandemic.

To engage in place-based study and inquiry, I present a set of beliefs, ideas, and practices that are rooted in a commitment to transformative learning, interconnectedness, and social change. As part of this presentation of understandings and approaches related to place-based inquiry, I describe the subsequent teaching, learning, and relationships fostered by one fourth-grade teacher and students as they continued their examination of food instability and supports during the COVID-19 pandemic recovery. The following set is not meant to be a prescriptive set of instructions for place-based study. Instead, I urge educational leaders to recognize the inescapable role that place has in the learning and development of youth as part of broader efforts to position classrooms as sites of resistance, hope, and possibility, especially during arduous, unstable times like the COVID19-pandemic. In such a way, this set of approaches and orientations for place-based inquiry extends Zhao’s and Watterston’s (2021) recommendations of utilizing this moment – the transition and recovery of the COVID-19 pandemic – to reimagine teaching, learning, and schooling in ways that center students, inquiry, authenticity, and flexibility.

Starting points for leveraging place in learning

Building upon a diversity of experiences and interests

When planning lessons focused on key disciplinary ideas and skills, it is crucial to consider students’ interests, hobbies, and experiences inside and outside of school. These interests can include students’ concerns about their school and neighborhood. As part of the fourth-grade teacher’s redesign of her math units focused on food access, she facilitated many individual and group discussions to learn about previous experiences or relationships with people who relied on neighborhood food pantries and other food assistance programs. During these discussions, students mentioned that the school was “a member of the community too” and “that the food issue should be a school issue too.” Their questions and wonderings about the functioning and locations of food pantries were foundations for designing lessons in other subject areas (e.g., English and Spanish language arts, social studies).

Additionally, students’ discussions included generating ideas about possible final projects for their math unit of bar graphs, which would aid the functioning and flourishing of the food pantry program located at their school. The fourth-grade teacher reported that students “want to make sure that the project is realistic” and “practical for what they can do to help the pantry.” Consequently, as the class learned more about the food pantry through meetings with the pantry coordinators, they proposed a set of project ideas for feedback from the coordinators about usefulness and feasibility. The result of this iterative dialogue was the fourth-grade class working on a final project that entailed presenting an array of bar graphs to showcase the amount of people that would visit the food pantry per day in a two-week span and the amount of food supply at the start and end of this time period. In such a way, the fourth-grade class’s final project demonstrates how engaging in different forms of discussion and asking for feedback can be key practices that guide students to make connections between what they are learning in a subject area and its application to the functioning and flourishing of their communities.

While it is essential to leverage communal concerns and interests among students within teaching and learning, educators must also be proactive in creating opportunities for students to express their varied perspectives, experiences, and responses to these issues. How people understand and behave in a place varies based on their social identifications and group memberships. Having students exposed to different perspectives and ways of acting can help ensure that their study of disciplinary ideas and places does not cater to one-sided interpretations and generalizations. It is especially imperative to embrace the knowledges of students who are from groups who have historically been relegated by schooling and society at large as inferior. Incorporating materials and texts that Lin (2016) says allows “students to see themselves in mirrors and through windows” ensures that students can learn from multiple scholars, educators, and authors who have similar social identifications, as well as from those of different groups and geographic locations. As part of embracing diverse forms of knowledge, educators can consider incorporating resources that are not text-based, such as multimedia, maps, and visual representations. Additionally, they can encourage their students to bring artifacts and materials from their homes for their activities and projects.

For instance, the fourth-grade class leveraged their graphs on the rates and frequencies of resident attendance and food distribution in their subsequent reflective discussions with volunteers and staff members from the food pantry. They facilitated initial discussions by pointing out interesting data from their graphs and indicated the types of food that were in highest and lowest demand, as well as the days and times with the highest and lowest attendance. These analyses led to subsequent efforts to generate other forms of data, such as transcriptions from interviews with residents and maps of nearby food pantries and neighborhood refrigerators, which would help create targeted, well-informed goals and action steps to support the food pantry. As students were gathering this data, their teacher consistently facilitated activities centered on collective and critical inquiry to make sense of these multiple forms of knowledge.

Bridging past to present realities and local to global forces

As students apply disciplinary skills and understandings to learn more about their surroundings, they should be presented with activities and resources that encourage them to learn about how past events and ongoing processes have influenced these settings. Many scholars across various knowledge traditions (e.g., Gilmore, 2007; McKittrick, 2006; Tuck & McKenzie, 2014) have argued that the different ways in which various places function often perpetuate broader forms of oppression. For instance, the composition of families in schools may change due to major neighborhood demographic shifts caused by societal processes such as gentrification, housing displacement, immigration patterns, and racial segregation. For instance, gentrification and housing displacement can lead to a drastic increase of student enrollment from White and middle- and high-income groups and the transfer of students from low-income and racially minoritized groups (Alvarado & Butler, 2023). However, in the case of the focal public school, these societal processes, coupled with a large influx of undocumented immigrant residents, have resulted in a student population predominantly from low-income, racially-minoritized, and non-homeownership groups (Alvarado, 2022).

Indeed, many contemporary social inequities that permeate schools are the manifestations of enduring forms of oppression. In the case of gentrification, housing displacement, and xenophobia, they are often framed as outcomes of White Supremacy and Settler Colonialism, which together justify the subjugation of Black people, the erasure of Indigenous people, the centrality of humans over other living beings, and the ownership of land. Instead of dismissing these ongoing historicized disparities, educators should frame the study of place-based issues as opportunities for students to contest understandings, beliefs, and relations that keep social injustices intact, especially those they experience and witness in their everyday lives. Further, they can work with students from other classes and schools to learn how an issue takes shape in another setting and compares to their location. Such experiences would allow students to realize that social problems in one place are intertwined with multiple areas and groups of people.

For example, the fourth-grade class’s analyses of their newly generated interview transcriptions and maps about food pantries and neighborhood demographics led to them making connections among documentation status, job security, and food insecurity. They engaged in class-wide and small-group discussions about the immigration trends in their neighborhood and the material and social affordances that are denied to those with undocumented status. Concurrently, the fourth-grade teacher held journal entry sessions for students to reflect on how immigration and job and food insecurity influenced their everyday lives and their families’ relationships with different groups of people and entities in the neighborhood. In fact, these activities inspired the fourth-grade class, with consultation of volunteers and staff from the school-based food pantry, to create informational flyers about the pantry and neighborhood refrigerators, where people could donate and collect food. The school’s main office staff helped the fourth-grade class disseminate the flyers by making copies for all classes in every grade level and helping distribute them.

Afterward, with the help of one food pantry volunteer, the fourth-grade class was connected with another fourth-grade class in another school that also supported a food pantry program. First, the teachers held several meetings over Zoom to introduce themselves, learn about their professional goals and aspirations, their teaching philosophy and approaches, and their instructional programs. As part of these meetings, the focal fourth-grade teacher gave the other teacher copies of materials that the class had already created around the topic of food insecurity and resources to share with her group of students. These conversations resulted in the fourth-grade class from the other neighborhood creating a PowerPoint presentation about their food pantry program and the focal fourth-grade class generating questions based on the presentation. And so, when the fourth-graders met through Google Hangouts, they were prepared to engage with each other in a structured, purposeful manner, with one class presenting about their food pantry and the other asking follow-up questions. Subsequent class meet-ups were dedicated to students analyzing and comparing their data about the food pantry and its connection to broader neighborhood issues. Thereafter, the fourth-grade classes conceptualized opportunities for cross-school collaborative projects and professional learning experiences for teachers.

Encouraging pausing and sense of uncomfortability as precursors for action

Place-based learning can lead to subsequent, grander actions for transformative change. At the same time, it is crucial to have moments to pause and reflect to ensure that our efforts are not premature, impulsive, or counterproductive to our intentions of addressing the social injustices that permeate our lives. These pauses allow us to ask ourselves if our learning trajectory about a place-based issue was open to understandings, relationships, and behaviors that have been historically devalued and ignored in society. We can contemplate our receptiveness toward letting go of deficit-based assumptions about people, relationships, and knowledges from different places. We can reflect upon our willingness to be uncomfortable and come to terms with our internalized problematic understandings and behaviors.

Pausing also allows us to think about our relational ethics and accountability to a place. We can contemplate our roles and responsibilities toward the places and beings with which we learn and engage. We can deliberate if our actions align with how we view our relation to a place. Specifically, we can gauge whether our proposed solutions and actions exacerbate, maintain, or improve a place-based issue. Did our behaviors and forms of learning further promote the oppression and minoritization of groups of beings (human and non-human), social relations, and traditions? Were our proposed actions to promote the well-being and flourishing of a place only quick fixes that keep enduring inequities intact?

Asking these questions as part of place-based learning should occur within the context of authentic, care-centered, and safe spaces. Educators can facilitate and should be a part of this inquiry through different modalities. For instance, they can have their class pause and reflect through journaling, creating three-dimensional representations, and sketching or drawing. Before facilitating open discussions, educators may encourage their students to converse with their peers, families, and community stakeholders about their relationality and accountability to a place and their receptiveness to unfamiliar experiences and uncomfortable realizations.

As previously mentioned, the fourth-grade class had opportunities to reflect on their learning about the food access, pantries, and related neighborhood inequities. Along with these efforts, the fourth-grade teacher facilitated a subsequent unit where the purpose was to deliberate, contemplate, and think about the effectiveness, approach, and impact of their previous projects about their neighborhood food pantry. On a broader level, the goal was to reflect upon inherent assumptions and biases about the topic of study, focal neighborhood, and residents, and upon how these viewpoints shaped the project. Some unit activities included conducting interviews with residents and volunteers as well as distributing surveys to other classes and members of the school. These activities also encouraged the students to seek recommendations for creating sustainable processes that would help maintain outcomes from their projects and support future efforts from incoming fourth graders. Later, the fourth-grade class started to conceptualize processes that would help continue these student-community organization partnerships beyond their time in their elementary school. In such a way, they were ensuring that their projects would become foundations for malleable yet sustainable efforts that future elementary school students could lead, to continue to address the complex, persistent issue of food insecurity.

Resituating schools beyond enclosures or backgrounds

Recentering place within learning and teaching in schools shows how educational settings are public entities that constantly influence and are shaped by their neighborhoods and other spaces across various societal levels. By facilitating through place-based issues (e.g., food pantries in a school cafeteria), teachers can create learning environments where students bring their most authentic selves and engage in intentional work geared toward individual and collective transformation. Through a place-based lens, students, teachers, and administrators can position the COVID-19 pandemic as a pivotal historical moment that can catalyze study and efforts to resist matrices of oppression and create possible emancipatory futures in society.