Below are excerpts from the Executive Summary from this report. The complete report can be downloaded from the bottom of this page.
Finding a Place for Place-based Education
in Bradford, Vermont, 2004-2005
An Evaluation of Project CO-SEED
Prepared for:
Antioch New England Institute
& the Place-based Education Evaluation Collaborative (PEEC)
Prepared by:
Michael Duffin
& Program Evaluation and Educational Research
(PEER) Associates, Inc.
January 24, 2006
Project CO-SEED’s primary purpose is to help schools and communities work together to develop community- and place-based approaches to education while simultaneously strengthening the community and helping the environment. CO-SEED is a project of Antioch New England Institute of Antioch New England Graduate School in Keene, NH. CO-SEED works with a given site for three or more years, and has been implemented at twelve sites since 1998. CO-SEED’s official tenure in Bradford, Vermont (the subject of this report) lasted from January of 2002 through December of 2005.
Each year CO-SEED conducts extensive program evaluations. This report on the Bradford site will be folded into a larger report produced in the late summer of 2006 that summarizes quantitative and qualitative evaluation findings for four different CO-SEED sites (including Bradford), all of which are wrapping up their three years with CO-SEED in the 2005-06 school year.
The main themes reported in the narrative portrait presented in this report are:
· The composting project has been very successful, expanding school-wide, and connecting to the community in multiple ways.
· Use of the nearby Low-St. John Forest for learning has become a popular and well-integrated part of the school curriculum.
· Several other projects have added to a strong sense of connection between the school and the community.
· The pre-existing culture of the town requires a special kind of effort to build long lasting partnerships.
· The on-site CO-SEED Coordinator (both the role and the individual person) was and will be central to the success of place-based education in Bradford.
· Bradford is teetering on the edge, but has not yet fully crossed a “tipping point” toward the long term sustainability of place-based education.
· Institutionalizing funding for the Coordinator position, clarifying the role of place-based education in the school mission, and considering setting up structures for common planning time for grade level teams are all key next steps.
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