What is a landscape project-based curriculum?

A curriculum for a landscape project is a method of place-based education, an educational approach that is locally driven, community-based, and/or ecologically focused. It is a packaged set of learning objectives, lessons, and hands-on activities designed to occur in a project with the objective of teaching youth about landscape and ecological systems within their community. A landscape project-based curriculum is a tool to help educators teach environmental concepts in their local park. 

Research advocating for place-based education and field science argues that this model of learning expands a young person’s idea of how science work is accomplished, and that science discovery can also happen outside – not always inside a lab. Studies also show that participation in environmental education programs outside lead to short-term improvements in environmental attitudes and behavior. Active, hands on activities; focusing on local issues; access and repeat exposure to sites; engagement in projects that gather field information; active engagement of the teacher; sensory experiences; relationships between participants; and the novelty of and freedom of choice in activities were cited as impactful and are important items to consider including in a curriculum for your landscape project.

Types of Project-Based Curriculum

Perhaps it is not possible to develop a curriculum for your project that is fully integrated into a local school system, or you may encounter challenges finding or sustaining a partnership to keep the curriculum going after the project is built. A landscape project-based curriculum can take different forms.

Self-Guided: Self-guided materials may be one or a series of on-site, hands-on activities that focus on a specific, local environmental topic and is available to a parent; park ranger; scout leader; after-school program leader; and/or interested teacher. This may not be time intensive to do on-site and is possible for a landscape architect to author, with the support of reference examples, resources, and a consulting educator partner.

Classroom-Integrated: A curriculum designed for classroom integration includes more in-depth, hands-on activities—both in-class and outdoors—that explore environmental topics through the lens of a local park or landscape. These align with state science standards and are intended to be embedded into a school’s STEM/STEAM curriculum, supporting more outdoor learning. This approach is more time-intensive, requires commitment from teachers or schools, includes teacher training and professional development, has repeated site visits, and may integrate a hands-on service project. This must be developed by a larger, collaborative team that includes curriculum specialists and landscape architects.

Useful Tool for Teachers

For this project, I interviewed environmental educators, teachers, and read articles about place-based education. Many cited a common challenge: teachers have a packed workload and specific education standards their lesson plans need to address. 

To make a curriculum for a landscape project a useful tool for teachers, it cannot be in addition to their workload, it must be a tool they can integrate into their pre-existing STEM/STEAM curriculum to adapt their teaching methods. It needs to meet applicable state standards and address the learning goals they are already working towards in their classrooms.