197. Liberatory, Equitable Pedagogy through Place-Based Learning with Micki Evans, Charity Marcella Moran, and Erin Sanchez

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In this episode, I speak with educators and authors Micki Evans, Charity Marcella Moran, and Erin Sanchez. Together, they wrote the book, Place-Based Learning: Connecting Inquiry, Community, and Culture, which explores how we can transform classrooms into equitable and inclusive spaces through place-based learning.

Our three guests are passionate educators with many years of experience. We chat in this episode about their work that explores the necessity of decolonizing curricula and implementing liberatory assessment practices to empower students. Additionally, they delve into the practicalities of place-based learning, emphasizing community asset mapping and leveraging student expertise to create dynamic, student-led educational experiences. 

The Big Dream 

The big dream, as articulated by our guests, revolves around empowering students to consume, critique, and contribute to their world. Further, they seek to create an educational experience where students maximize their innate talents and challenge oppressive systems. 


This dream extends to envisioning the community as a classroom through place-based learning, encouraging students to engage deeply with their surroundings and to learn from diverse perspectives.

Mindset Shifts Required

To realize this vision, educators must embrace several key mindset shifts. First, educators can embrace an open mind, as place-based learning asks us to reframe and decolonize our curriculums, starting to look at it from multiple perspectives. 


This involves shifting from a binary view of learning to a dynamic one, where students have more control over their learning journeys. Additionally, educators can trust their students to lead, support them with appropriate scaffolding, and view assessment as a tool for empowerment and social justice, rather than mere ranking or evaluation.

Action Steps  
Because adopting a place-based learning practice can be a major shift for educators, here are some actions steps you may wish to adopt to get started: 

Step 1: Examine your own place story. 
Educators can start by examining personal connections to your environment, and develop your place story which can help form identity and values. You may reflect on themes of, “Where did I grow up? Where am I living now? How do I connect with this place and space?”

Step 2: Implement community asset mapping
Start with your classroom and find out what your students are experts in. What assets do they bring into the classroom? How are you using that to build your curriculum? This can be a great starting point to find place-based learning journeys. 

Step 3: Start small and keep growing
You don’t have to jump all the way in and try everything. Instead, pick one or two design principles of place-based learning and see how it evolves in your classroom before moving on to the next steps. You can learn more about place-based design principles in our guest’s book, Place-Based Learning.

Challenges?

Common challenges are often around partnering with the community, like the school structures and red tape that make it difficult to get students off campus or community partners on campus. 


Another barrier teachers face is the pacing—educators often feel they don’t have time for place-based learning—and the political landscape we’re in. Overcoming these requires a focus on educational aspirations and the big dream for students, as well as strategic planning and support from school leaders.

One Step to Get Started 

Begin by adopting a flexible mindset and choosing a small, manageable place-based learning project. Reflect on your current practices, involve students in the planning process, and use available resources to connect with community partners. By starting small, you can gradually build confidence and skills to expand place-based learning in your educational setting.

Stay Connected

You can find this week’s guests on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and their website, PBL Path. 



To help you implement today’s takeaways, I’m sharing the guests' free resources: a blog page, Blank Place Based Project Planning Tool, and free reproducibles. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 197 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below.

Quotes: 

• 2:45 “The biggest idea—which is kind of crazy to have to say out loud—for education, is that whatever we do in this process of education, students and learners of all ages are able to consume, critique, and contribute to their world.” (Charity Marcella Moran)
• 6:58 “Place-based learning isn't binary, you know where you’re either doing it all or not at all. But it’s a spectrum, and a teacher can start anywhere and grow their practice based on their students and their context.” (Erin Sanchez)
• 21:28 “We have to trust our students, even if they’re littles. We need to trust them that they can lead the way. You may have designed this amazing place-based journey and the kids may take it in a different direction … letting go and seeing what the kids can do just gives me great hope for the future.” (Micki Evans)

TRANSCRIPT
0:00:20 - Lindsay Lyons
Thank you, you, as we have this conversation today, do we want to go? Mickey, charity, erin, does that work? Okay, sure. 

0:00:28 - Micki Evans
I'm Mickey Evans and I'm just so excited to be here with you, lindsay, and with my colleagues and good friends. I'm a passionate educator, have been for many, many years and a proud grandmother of four granddaughters who are all under the same roof this holiday. 

0:00:50 - Charity Moran
I'm Charity Moran and I almost forgot it's my turn to go, but I was like, yes, four grandchildren. But yes, I'm from Shreveport, louisiana. Most of my work and my education career had started in Louisiana. So, in addition to all the things in the bio, I think right now, today, just where we are historically, louisiana is in the center of my heart, right now. 

0:01:21 - Erin Sanchez
Yeah, erin Sanchez. Originally from a small farming community in Minnesota but now in Tacoma, washington, the ancestral homeland of the Puyallup Nation. And I have been an educator for 24 years, lucky enough to work with Mickey almost all of those years and Charity for the last decade or so and just love partnering and collaborating with these two and excited to talk about our work. 

0:01:50 - Lindsay Lyons
Thank you all. So much. Beautiful introductions, and so I think your book is so wonderful and so will align to, I think, this first framing question I usually ask guests. Dr Bettina Love talks about the idea of freedom dreaming in this way. She says their dreams grounded in the critique of injustice and I just really love that to kind of anchor the work we do as educators in the space of education. And I'm curious, either each of you can answer or kind of whoever feels called to answer, but I'm wondering what the big dream that you hold for education is in the context of that thinking about freedom dreaming. 

0:02:30 - Charity Moran
I'll go. I kind of this is Charity. I very much so. Love Dr Love first of all. And so this quote of you know, thinking about freedom, dreaming and the idea of critique. I think that for me, the biggest idea which is kind of crazy to have to say out loud for education is that whatever we do in this process of education, students and learners of all ages actually are able to, you know, consume, critique and contribute to their world. Like with those three things are happening and if we're doing what it takes to do that, I think that's kind of the big idea for me. 

0:03:18 - Micki Evans
I definitely have to agree with you on that. When I first came to education, it was really about how do we maximize the innate gifts and talents that all students have and it's evolved over time, especially with PBL because it's really getting into how do we break down those systems of oppression so that all children and students and learners can achieve their fullest potential. 

0:03:48 - Erin Sanchez
Definitely yes, that community as classroom being the big dream for me, I think, and to facilitate that really reckoning with the racist structures that we sometimes feel helpless and we end up perpetuating. But how do we? How is there just an indigenizing of our current system? In a life before this, I was a spoken word poet and when I thought about indigenizing education, it was like educating our children in the kitchen, you know, disinfecting canning jars and adding pectin to berry mash, and in the garage, tearing the transistor radio, limb from limb, you know. Or in the woods, you know, with showing asufficiency, in the hospital, on the building site, in the movie studio, you know, in places adults haven't even imagined children being or doing schooling kind of introduction to kind of the mindset shift that I'm thinking about when I pick up the book. 

0:05:11 - Lindsay Lyons
I am a person who, like, really connected immediately with everything you're saying and kind of had that head-on moment that you get with books, that you're like, yes, like these people are like connected to my brain and you've put words to the things that I've thought but haven't put words to, and you extend my understanding of this stuff because you're giving me concrete practices and examples of just wow, wow, it can be even more than I imagined, which is so cool. 

And then I'm also imagining there's some teachers who could pick up the book and be like, whoa, this is so very different from anything I've thought of, like I didn't even that I'm just teaching social studies from a book right now, you know, or whatever. And so I'm curious, particularly for those folks but even for someone like me who had a lot of kind of aha moments as I read the book and maybe have done similar things in the past, but not to the extent you've laid it out what are those kind of like aha moments or mindset shifts where people who are just encountering the book and just kind of sifting through all this stuff and making sense of everything you've laid out there what's really required of them to get the most out of this? 

0:06:12 - Micki Evans
to make some of those freedom dreams that you named come true. I think, for one is to have a really open mind, because place-based learning really asks us to reframe our curriculum and decolonize our curriculum. So we're looking at it from multiple perspectives, not just a single story or a single narrative. So that's a huge mind shift and turning over more of that control to the students to really give them a voice to make an impact on their community themselves. 

0:06:50 - Erin Sanchez
And I hope that the book is empowering for teachers and sends the message loud and clear that place-based learning isn't binary. You know where you're either doing it all or not at all right, but it's a spectrum and a teacher can start anywhere and grow their practice based on their students and their context and their own self-reflection and their journey, so that it doesn't feel so daunting or scary. 

0:07:22 - Charity Moran
And there's also this shift around the idea of assessment and we emphasize the liberatory assessment practices, and so it's just a shift in thinking about how are we assessing? What does it mean to assess? How are we leveraging assessments to empower students and community? You know thinking about even promoting equity and social justice. So really, you know thinking about all of the things that assessment could be, as opposed to really what it is now in terms of how it's used and even abused. But how can it become more of what, like Zaretta Hammond refers to, as you know, a tool towards this partnership, this learning alliance between teacher and student? 

0:08:30 - Lindsay Lyons
teacher and student, I definitely got that sense that this is. This is a shift very much away from assessment in that kind of hegemonic dominance that we often see assessment as like a tool for like you fail or you're better, or write this ranking or any sort right. I very much read your work as like it's the process, right, it's the process with engaging community, it's the reflection. I love so many of the reflection protocols that you all named and and that reflection process, that idea of expanding what a project is to include collecting data in community and with community, and inviting community in and truly being a partner, not just in name but in an actual process. And so I love to the intentionality between not just naming the word decolonize but to also cite, like Eve Tuck's work I think Tuck and Yang's work around decolonization, to name that like I always get this wrong, but like that it's not a metaphor, right, it's about repatriating indigenous land and life, right, they write about, and so I can see that idea present in all of your work as well, which I really appreciate. 

So there's so much in the book that I was like we don't have time to do all of this in 30 minutes, but I would love to invite you all to share kind of like what are your either favorite pieces of the book? We can talk about any of the kind of I think the original pieces being very much like the framework. We can talk about specific practices or projects, because I also love that you all share projects that you have done and kind of really flesh all of those out for us to understand. So, yeah, what are kind of your favorite actions and things that you want to highlight for listeners? 

0:10:02 - Charity Moran
Yeah, I know one of my favorite parts of the book is how we leverage the troubled waters project. 

We leverage a specific project, kind of connect in part one to each of the you know design principles that we present and so being able to see, you know, you read the theory about it, you get into the research, but then you have an actual project that's been implemented, that connects back to and gives you know a direct kind of line to say the thing we just read about this is how it looks in the real world. So that's one of my favorite pieces, for sure. 

0:10:51 - Micki Evans
I agree. And how Dr Delpit, who wrote our foreword, tied that in so well I mean the story that she shares in the foreword just speaks to Troubled Waters, the project that we highlight. 

0:11:07 - Lindsay Lyons
Do you guys mind giving an overview, just a little bit, for listeners who haven't read the book yet, of the troubled water? I know that it's very in-depth in the book, but maybe we could just give a little preview. 

0:11:18 - Charity Moran
Yeah, so it's a project anchored in the place of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where there was a protest around all of the swimming pools were being closed in the majority Black sides of town. And so, you know, leveraging that movement during the protests but connecting the place and the history to connecting the students to that event to then now, in current times, work to. You know, leverage that history and knowledge of place to propose new pool plans in new locations, you know, with this in mind, and so, along the way, students debunk myths about you know Black people as swimmers and explore, you know historical examples of that, and so it's really a lot that just ties into this one place, this one historical event along the way. 

0:12:17 - Lindsay Lyons
Thank you so much. That was perfect, erin, anything you wanted to contribute around your favorite pieces. 

0:12:23 - Erin Sanchez
Oh, my favorite pieces. 

Well, I mean, since this book's imaginings, when we were just thinking about what we wanted, we wanted it to. 

Well, I mean, since this book's imaginings, when we were just thinking about what we wanted, we wanted it to be a workbook, right, we wanted, like teachers in there using it, doing the reflections, planning a project, and we've always said, like, if you read it from beginning to end, you'll walk away with a complete, you know, project plan, which I think is really unique. But what I've grown to love about it, now that it's in my hand, is that there is a place for leaders in the book, for school leaders, for instructional coaches. The whole part three is using the practitioners round, which is a really beautiful, just like coaching cycle, but unique to place-based learning, for how to support teachers on this journey and how leaders can leverage their positional power to create this space for place-based learning, this space for teachers to be able to take risks and try this out and see the impact on their students. And so that's what I've, like, grown to love is also empowering leaders Like you have a role in this, and it forces them also to examine the existing systems too. 

0:13:47 - Micki Evans
Yeah, and the other thing I want to add to that is the power of storytelling throughout, in terms of being a leader, using stories to create that change and to leverage members of the community students, teachers and just sharing and uncovering the stories of the community as well. We just collaborated with a group in India, PBL Propel, and designed a conference that was for leaders from all over India and Nepal, and they walked away with a design, a vision and a design for implementing and sustaining place-based learning at their sites, using our practitioners round and storytelling. 

0:14:33 - Lindsay Lyons
It's so incredible because when I was reading through the leader pieces, immediately I thought it connected very well. I think chapter 13, maybe as your chapter on the barriers. And I I just feel like as a coach, there's a lot of teachers I've worked with that have said, you know, yeah, but the barrier is this or the barrier is this right. And I just feel like as a coach, there's a lot of teachers I've worked with that have said, you know, yeah, but the barrier is this or the barrier is this Right. And I mean we can, I can invite open the conversation here to talk about particular barriers and how you'd overcome them. But I think much of what you share in the leader piece addresses directly many of the barriers that I've heard personally teachers say, yes, but I don't have like the logistical support here, I don't have the family communication piece here, or you know I just there's a lot of moving pieces. I need time in the day for planning and whatever. 

There's so many pieces that I think are addressed by that leader point. So if there's anyone listening who's like, yeah, this feels like a lot like the things are addressed at towards the end of the book in that part three, which I really appreciate. So thank you for putting that in there, because I really really appreciate that as a coach. Are there specific barriers or kind of challenges that you have, I don't know, heard the most in your work, anything that has been something that's come up for either teachers, leaders or communities, and then maybe how did you kind of help people through that or what came out of that challenge, if that question makes sense. 

0:15:57 - Erin Sanchez
Oh yeah, we definitely hear. There's a pattern to the challenges we hear and one of them is, like the, just those school structures, like you know, sometimes it's really difficult to get students off campus Right, and there's a lot of just red tape and just paperwork involved in that or getting community partners on the campus, you know. So helping leaders really look at what is their realm of control and what is their realm of influence and how to make that process more simplified, you know. And also just things that they don't teach us in teacher school, like how to write a letter to a potential community partner, you know. So we include a template for that, just to you know, quickly dispel any notion that there's some sort of barrier between teachers and a potential community partner, that we can be reaching out to anyone or that we can turn that over to an instructional coach that might be able to help teachers create a community partner database and identify those potential partners. So just those small things that can be done. 

0:17:12 - Micki Evans
And students can be a great asset for connecting with community partners as well, sometimes more effective than the adults in the school. 

0:17:23 - Erin Sanchez
Yes, very true. And then I know another barrier that I'm going to let Mickey or Charity talk about is the pacing. We hear that a lot. You know like we don't have time for place based learning. How do we build that into our existing scope and sequence? To either of you want to speak to that? 

0:17:43 - Charity Moran
Yeah, so that's definitely sometimes one of those, you know, barriers or challenges that make themselves known. 

And so then you know, like you said in part three, there's a lot of designing the you know the amount of content that's being put in there and things of that sort, so that we can at least try to keep it aligned and make sure that we start with the standards in mind, so that the things that we are creating as we start spelling out those ways of knowing that we know we're anchoring in, you know, content as well as justice, you know, and as well as other ways of knowing that we want to make sure we attend to. 

And then you know, of course there's also the political landscape, because a lot of people hear things like, you know words like liberatory and decolonize and culturally responsive, and that opens up a can of worry that as long as we re-anchor in ideas, like your very first question what are our biggest dreams for education? And as long as we think about those big dreams and use that as our measure, then the things that we're asking folks to do, and, you know, supporting the work in this book, it's not a big leap, you know, if we really just re-anchor in that dream in our vision for education because, at the core, you know, we can put politics aside and focus on what do we want students to walk away with? Who do we want them to be as a result of this education? 

0:19:34 - Lindsay Lyons
And I feel like many times, especially the worrying that we are doing, we are thinking of usually not even our students. We're thinking of family members of students and we're usually thinking about a very specific group of families of students, right, Like the, usually like the white family members who are going to get like really stressed about whatever, and it's like, okay, first of all, we're only thinking our worries are contained usually to this small group. That's not, that's messed up. Right, it's not even the students. And, second of all, right Like we, the students, get so engaged when we do this work, Like they are so excited. 

Students are excited and I just I think about, like when I was a social studies teacher the first year I taught, I had no idea what I was doing and I was like all right, we're gonna do the textbook and we're gonna like kind of race through all the content, we're gonna cover it all and you're gonna do good on this final state test. No one liked my class. It was so boring, it was horrible. And then I have the same students in an elective where we did. One of the things that you guys talk about a lot is that students are collecting the data, they're interviewing. There's storytelling involved. I'm just wondering about the dynamics of that shift because I think that's probably hard for someone like me who went from. You know this, I'm going to teach the textbook to OK, this is way more expansive. I have to let go of control. My students are kind of taking ownership of this. Any kind of tips or thoughts to lift up from the book from that perspective of like students are really leading this journey. 

0:21:25 - Micki Evans
I think it really. We have to trust our students right, even if they're littles, right. We need to trust them that they can lead the way, and so you may have designed this amazing place-based journey and the kids may take it in a different direction. So being flexible because, you know, most teachers are control freaks I was, am, but by letting go and seeing what the kids can do just gives me great hope for the future. Truly, because they're taking action and they're engaged in things that mean it means something to them. 

0:22:06 - Erin Sanchez
Mm-hmm. 

And letting go doesn't in any way mean that the support isn't there, that there aren't scaffolds in place to teach them the skills like feedback and revision and reflection and knowing that that takes time. 

Context of the place-based journey. So they know why they're learning what they're learning and in many cases we encourage them to create the why, to set that why for themselves and for their peers, and so hopefully they feel supported at every step. And just like I said before about place-based learning not being an all or nothing, you know the process of students learning the skills that are going to set them up for success in their place-based journeys is also not all or nothing. It's going to take a little bit of time and teachers can say, oh, I really want to work in this place-based journey on students giving, receiving and incorporating feedback based journey on students giving, receiving and incorporating feedback, and that's going to be my priority, and so it feels more manageable and tangible. And then students do walk away with those skills that they then apply to the next project until they have much more autonomy than they did six months or nine months ago. 

0:23:29 - Charity Moran
Yeah, it's very much so. A journey and this kind of ongoing journey, which is why I think one of the features I really love around the reflection questions and that there are more questions than definitions in a lot of the things that we do, because that encourages this kind of ongoingness notion of the work. Like, okay, I did it for this project, now maybe I want to, like Erin said zero in now on building some of the reflection skills, so now I'm going to reflect, on reflecting to make sure that I'm building and baking that into the lesson with the students, so keeping those questions in mind as well. 

0:24:08 - Micki Evans
And I think the same is true for collaboration, because most place-based learning journeys ask students to collaborate and work together and that does take some intentional scaffolding with students. We can't just throw them into a group and expect that they're going to be working seamlessly. So that's part of that journey. So the first project you may be spending a lot of time on building those collaboration skills. 

0:24:37 - Lindsay Lyons
This makes me think of two questions, so feel free to answer either one. Whatever is most interesting to you. One question I was wondering is what is the most exciting skill that you've seen students build within a place-based learning project? And then the other question is I just love the reflection protocols you have, and I was wondering if you had a favorite reflection protocol from that list. There were many I had never heard of, and so I would love to lift those up for our listeners as well. Feel free to go either direction. 

0:25:11 - Erin Sanchez
Feel free to go either direction. As soon as you said a skill that students learned, I immediately went to empathy, like developing that habit of empathy over time, like with my high school students, and seeing it very acutely in one particular project where they were collecting oral histories from people who had experienced genocide in Africa, asia or Latin America. So it required this high level of empathy and thank goodness we did practice interviews first, like we spent a lot of time developing those interview questions and follow up questions and creating like question maps and fishbowling the questions, because I realized pretty quickly like wow, their questions are super inappropriate because, yeah, that skill had not been developed yet and so it was over the course of the project culminating in those interviews. In those interviews and just being able to see how students had both kind of evolved and internalized the stories of the folks that they were hearing from was a really beautiful thing, yeah. 

0:26:38 - Charity Moran
I think kind of aligning with, I think, aaron's answer earlier around this notion of self-sufficiency and this one of the skills in students that I love see happen, and even some of the student testimonials that we have in the book. They've said, they say things like you know, I feel I feel more empowered or I feel like I'm in control of what I'm learning, or you know, it's just that type of energy from the students has been one of the favorite, one of my most favorite pieces around almost all of these projects. We hear something to that effect. 

0:27:20 - Micki Evans
Yeah, really empowering kids to make a difference in their community and taking those skills beyond the classroom. So the protocols that we use some were created by us, and what I love about the practitioners round is teachers have an opportunity to get feedback on their project design. But we also involve students in the process as well as community members, so it's not just teachers doing the protocols. We're engaging all the different stakeholders in those protocols as a way to critique and revise and refine as we move forward in the journey. 

0:28:06 - Lindsay Lyons
Yeah, I think the student experience triad was my favorite. I had marked that as my favorite. They actually. How often do you get to sit down with students and be like all right, like tell me about it, like what are your thoughts? 

0:28:20 - Erin Sanchez
And you just get to listen. That's so cool, I love. I also love the community partner review. That happens at the very end of a project, where you know both the community partner and the students, either asynchronously or in person, sitting down in the same room together, are like creating this artistic expression of their experience of the project and that's like so cool just to see what they come up with and how they communicate with each other and just the stories that they're sharing. Yeah, those interactions are really pretty awesome. 

0:28:58 - Micki Evans
And that really helps to sustain that partnership. So we're not just using the partners once and then bye, bye. It's really sustaining that and seeing how the work might evolve over time. 

0:29:10 - Lindsay Lyons
I also love that you named specific examples too about sustainability of projects. Like it's, the partners, but also the projects themselves kind of, could live on and in the next year students add to it. That's a super cool concept. I think Anything else that you all would like to add before we go to kind of our closing questions round? All right, if anything comes up, feel free to jump in. So the first question and we could just kind of go. Everyone can kind of share their thoughts here. What's one thing you would encourage listeners to do once they end the episode? I will vote that people should get the book and read that, but maybe, as the book is in the mail being delivered to them, what's kind of a thing they can do to jumpstart this type of pedagogy? 

0:30:02 - Micki Evans
I think one of the things is having individuals look at their own play story to be to begin to see how they are connected to place and how place help create their own identity, who they are today, what their values are, um, so kind of beginning with what's my place story, where did I grow up or where am I living now and how do I connect with this place and this space? 

0:30:45 - Erin Sanchez
And I think a next step that we outline in the book too, is that community asset mapping, starting with your classroom, like finding out what your students are experts in, um, what assets they bring into the classroom every day, um, and then using that as a basis to look at your, your curriculum, your content, um, and and figure out how those can be like little, little nuggets of place-based learning journeys. 

0:31:20 - Charity Moran
And then you've already got your book. So once you've done that, and considering what my colleagues have said as well, you don't have to jump all the way in. Try picking one or two of the design principles and seeing how does it feel, you know, for yourself as a practitioner, for your students, and again thinking about how are they responding to what's happening. And then from there, just fold in more, fold in more, until you get ready for that project that you design as you read the book. 

0:31:51 - Lindsay Lyons
These are great examples. Thank you all for sharing those. My next question is because everyone who comes on is like a lifelong learner, constantly learning things. I'm just curious. It could relate to education or not, could be totally different. What is something that you personally have been learning about lately? 

0:32:16 - Erin Sanchez
about lately. It was the holidays. I had two weeks off. I actually read a mystery novel so I'm like, oh, what was before that? No, but like, my favorite interactions in the past year, both through professional development and just through online conversations and reading, have been Caroline Hill's EquityX Design. She was the founder of 228 Accelerator. We quote her several times in the book and she just talks about equity as a verb and really like process as product and how we design at the margins, whether that design be, you know, making changes within our own community, whether it be designing a place based learning experience, but how we're designing at the margins and I just absolutely love her. And after the recent election, she's having these online spaces to just have dialogue with one another and care for ourselves and care for our communities, which I've really appreciated too. 

0:33:33 - Charity Moran
That's what I'm thinking about. I've kind of been knee deep in the thinking about the uses of AR and VR, so augmented reality and virtual reality and this connections to place-based learning so, yeah, just really enjoying that. Some of it's kind of scary and I'm walking through that to think about what my teachers think along the way, because a lot of people are this technology thing and are we going to go completely iRobot? Are robots going to control the world? And things of that sort. So really digging into AR and VR with a lot of that in mind, connecting it to place-based learning and helping educators get into it themselves to overcome some of those fears and give the power back to the students, basically. 

0:34:29 - Erin Sanchez
You're going to have to teach her Mickey, and I as well. I'm so intrigued, but no so little. 

0:34:38 - Micki Evans
Oh, I think for me really in getting ready for this conference in India was really understanding the Indian context and what's going on within their educational system. And I worked with the group to create the first book on project-based learning in India that aligns the teachings of place-based learning to the ancient teachings of India and how colonized their educational system became and now kind of moving back and making those connections between the ancient teachings and now, and in India at a federal level they are really shifting what the focus is and it's really looking at the strategies and place-based learning you know making not just that, testing and testing and testing. So for me I spent a lot of time having learning and thinking about that. 

0:35:33 - Lindsay Lyons
Oh, my goodness, we're going to have to have another like connection, just about all those pieces. That's fantastic, I think. My final question is and we will link in the blog post for this episode to the book specifically so people can get it but is there anywhere that you individually would want people to connect with you in the online space? 

0:35:54 - Micki Evans
So we do have an Instagram and a Facebook LinkedIn, we have our personal LinkedIn and then we also have a PBL Path LinkedIn and we have a website. So, yeah, any way, they would love to connect with us. We'd love to chat about place-based learning. 

0:36:13 - Charity Moran
And we're at PBL Path on all the things. So it's really easy PBL Path on Instagram, Facebook. You look us up as PBL Path and then the website is pblpathcom. 

0:36:27 - Lindsay Lyons
And I'll link to all that in the blog post as well. Mickey, charity and Erin, thank you so, so much for this conversation today and for putting your brilliant book out into the world. 

0:36:36 - Erin Sanchez
Thank you, Lindsay, Thank you. 

0:36:37 - Micki Evans
Lindsay. Thank you, lindsay, it was a pleasure.

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