ABSTRACT
Place-based education makes use of the community to nurture place identities or, conversely, capitalizes on place identities by using local contexts to foster greater interest in the standardized curriculum. Place-conscious instruction may also lead to or make room for place-focused engagement with the community. At the very least, embracing place-conscious instruction might promote civic engagement or allow students to think more about issues close to home. The practice of building place-conscious curricula can reposition rural from the “periphery” to the “core,” upending the core–periphery dynamic. The idea of the core–periphery model is a term used in the sociology and economics to explain how influence or power is distributed between a core system and dependent or peripheral systems. In education, many decisions are made in a state’s urban center and then the influence of those decisions proliferates into the rural regions.
