Teacher Highlight

Mary Beth Morrissey

Marybeth Morrissey, a teacher at Williston Central School, was a participant in the Principles and Promising Practices of Place-Based Education workshop at Shelburne Farms, and was especially excited to learn more about Place-Based Education since the PLACE program was gearing up in Williston. After rediscovering a formerly neglected nature trail behind Williston’s Allen Brook School, Mary Beth and her colleague devised a journaling project, inspired and supported by the PLACE program. Monthly, her 40 third and fourth graders would photo-document a special place on the trail. Each time they left the classroom, they would find their special place snap a photo and write some reflections on the weather, the plants, or their feelings. The results are some beautiful and insightful montages of the natural area the students have since become intimate with. Photos and stories range from thoughts on the beaver dam to descriptions of the local habitats. One journal focused on Allen Brook, which runs behind the trail and showed images of the brook progressing from grey and barren, to covered in snow, and finally with spring greens emerging through the mud.

“We knew we just wanted to get the kids outside,” Mary Beth says. “The project was our commitment to getting them out there at least once a month.” Often that’s with company like a field naturalist from UVM, the Town Environmental Planner, Erica, or the Vermont Youth Conservation Corps who originally built the trail. “By using our outdoor landscape more consistently, students begin to view it as a legitimate school environment,” Mary Beth goes on. “Very rich learning takes place as a result. Students’ observations and questions are deeper and more conceptual, and we have many more ‘Why?’ and ‘I wonder...?’ conversations.”

According to Mary Beth, “the outside [as a valid learning environment] becomes more legitimate in the eyes of the kids when it is done regularly.” She has been surprised at the degree to which her students notice things and remember details, observing that even “kids that don’t shine academically have gotten a chance to notice things and contribute,” and that all of her students have made a noticeable shift to conceptual learning instead of just factual learning. Using Place-Based Education is “getting back to teaching in the way that got me into teaching in the first place.”

Though Place-Based Education emphasizes the importance of local knowledge and connections, Mary Beth makes it clear that thinking locally isn’t the same as thinking small; “I firmly believe that being active, informed participants in a global community requires an engagement with and awareness of our own backyards.”

The students produced a public website at the end of the school year that documents phenological changes on the trail over the course of the year. View the website here After the success of the first project, she plans to continue to utilize the local environment with her teaching in following year, focusing on historical Williston next.