Perspectives from Rural Maine Educators: Supporting and Inspiring Youth Through Place-Based Education

In rural Maine, daily life is intimately tied to the natural environment. Changes in seasonal milestones like the timing and yields of potato harvest and maple sap production impact how communities engage and work together. To adapt to this changing landscape, young Mainers must develop knowledge and skills to connect their physical surroundings to their ways of life. One way to support youth in this endeavor is through place-based experiences, which make learning geographically and personally relevant and build upon knowledge of industry, technology, natural resources, and local history. As a pedagogical framework, place-based education (PBE) is a relatively new approach. It has been shown to benefit youth engagement, collaboration, and content learning, but often requires more time, relationship-building, community support, and curricular flexibility than traditional STEM instruction. In this article, we present a case study of nine in-school and out-of-school rural Maine educators to examine if and how PBE is implemented in rural contexts. We find that while educators do not necessarily elect to use PBE to structure their activities per se, the ways in which they engage with youth are prime examples of PBE in practice. We highlight shared features and challenges of designing and implementing place-based experiences for youth and detail examples of activities anchored around local changes in natural phenomena. These perspectives demonstrate how the defining qualities of rural life create an ideal context for PBE and offer insights into conditions and strategies for all educators as they prepare youth as leaders towards a resilient future.