"This Is More Like Home": Knowing Nature through Community Mapping

Abstract

Place-based environmental education is a pedagogy that infuses environmental education across disciplines in a way that is relevant and meaningful to students. One collaborative approach to place-based environmental education, community mapping, explores and represents local knowledge, visions held by community members, and relationships between spatial, physical, personal, and cultural elements of place. This paper shares a community mapping project done by a British Columbian grade four class and, drawing from Knapp's (2005) ten ways of knowing nature, discusses how students came to know nature through observing, situated knowing, identifying, restoring, and transforming. Its findings encourage the inclusion of community mapping in place-based environmental education curriculum and instruction and illuminate the value of the products and process of community mapping.