An article in The Chronicle, “Learning Today: the Lasting Value of Place,” identifies the following benefits of place-based education:
- Peer-learning environments (including those outside the classroom)
- Exposure to diversity
- Research opportunities (“From laboratories to historical archives, place-based higher-education environments feature significant research infrastructures that give students opportunities to apply and enrich their classroom learning.”)
- Campus and community engagement
- Chance encounters (“that come with membership in a diverse intellectual community”)
For an interesting example of place-based education, see “Long Reads” (Inside Higher Ed): “To get students more engaged in texts, some professors hold marathon sessions where students read the books out loud.”
And of course the digital dimension shouldn’t be forgotten. See, for example, “The Humanities, Done Digitally”: “Scholarly work across the humanities, as in all academic fields, is increasingly being done digitally.”
