Place-Based Social Studies Education: Learning from Flint, Michigan

This book uses the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, as a touchstone for the importance and value of including place-based education in the social studies curriculum. Whitlock scrutinizes this local environmental issue to not only drive critical inquiry in the classroom, but also to show how the curriculum can propel valuable social change in the community. Each part of this book highlights critical place inquiry and place-based education with an overall inquiry question: How can schools respond to a community’s needs? How can schooling be reimagined to center “place”? How can teacher preparation be place-based? What did we learn from the Flint crisis and where do we go from here? Individual chapters investigate the inquiry question by examining Flint and the Flint water crisis more specifically, as well as the lessons we can learn from Flint educators. Social studies teachers (pre-K–16) can use these experiences to inform their own approach to understanding their own places.

Book Features:

• Employs narrative inquiry, including interviews with school officials, teachers, parents, and teacher educators.
• Offers key “takeaways” in every chapter to assist educators in applying place-based education principles to their classrooms.
• Written in an accessible journalistic style that is both scholarly and personal.
• Includes photographs taken by the author of real people and places in Flint that illustrate the story.

Annie McMahon Whitlock is an associate professor of history and social studies at Grand Valley State University, and a former middle school social studies teacher. She previously worked as an education professor at the University of Michigan-Flint.