This week, teacher educator and Virtual Exchange (VE) researcher Malin Reljanovic Glimäng (University of Malmö) in Sweden shares how place-based education can contribute to fostering critical thinking and ‘glocal’ awareness. This happens when students use their cities as classrooms .
What is Place-Based Education?
“Place-based education (PBE) is a powerful pedagogical approach that centres learning in the context of local communities’, explains Malin. “And it encourages students to become active participants and co-creators of knowledge by engaging directly with people, places, and issues around them. Through hands-on, community-connected experiences, the aim is to help students develop a deeper understanding of their own local environment.
Moreover, it enables a stronger sense of agency, while building the skills needed to address real-world social, political, and environmental challenges. The city offers a rich and dynamic site for learning.”
In Sweden, place-based outdoor pedagogy is often associated with younger learners and nature-oriented activities.
But Malin sees great potential in applying place-based approaches in urban settings and with university students. “Cities are rich with stories, tensions, and opportunities for critical exploration, and I am just beginning to tap into this pedagogical potential with the students in Malmö.”
How Does PBE Relate to Virtual Exchange?
“Virtual Exchange naturally lends itself to place-based learning. By connecting students from different parts of the world, VE creates opportunities to explore how local contexts shape global issues. When educators intentionally design projects where ‘place’ provides the content, students can compare, reflect on, and learn from each other’s environments.
She continues: “Place-based tasks highlight the uniqueness of each community. But the aim is also to generate critical conversations around shared sociopolitical issues.”
This approach aligns with critical global citizenship education, encouraging students to ask difficult questions, explore together, and develop a more nuanced, empathetic worldview. Malin draws inspiration from Mirjam Hauck’s Critical Virtual Exchange (CVE) framework and Vanessa Andreotti’s call to “dig deeper, relate wider, and embrace complexities” rather than reach for easy, and sometimes superficial, solutions to global challenges.
Examples of Place-Based Virtual Exchange
Reading the City
In collaboration with Katarzyna Radke (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland) and Cecilia Magadán (Universidad Nacional de San Martín, Argentina), Malin co-developed a VE project based on UN Sustainable Development Goal 11: Making cities inclusive, safe, and sustainable. Students in Malmö, Poznań, and Buenos Aires worked in transnational teams to explore urban sustainability and co-create digital campaigns relevant to all three cities. There were two iterations of the project and she says: “It inspired me to integrate PBE and design the city as a site for learning as a regular module, with or without VE, in one of our teacher education courses.”
The City as a Site for Learning
Last year, two parallel virtual exchanges emerged from this course module:
- With Baltimore and Tshwane:
Developed with Shannon Sauro (University of Maryland, Baltimore County) and Sibongile Mnisi (Tshwane University of Technology), this VE brought together teacher education students from Baltimore, Malmö, and Tshwane. Students co-designed lesson plans on sustainability topics relevant to their cities, using the urban environment as a teaching and learning tool. “The VE prompted future teachers in the US, South Africa, and Sweden to explore ways in which SDG11 resonates with diverse cities and different sociopolitical contexts, and how PBE tasks can enrich the curriculum.” - With Limpopo:
In collaboration with Samukezi Mrubula-Ngwenya (University of Limpopo), this interdisciplinary VE paired political science students in Limpopo with teacher education students in Malmö. The focus: how power and resistance are expressed in the urban landscape—through statues, monuments, and place-names. Students worked in transnational teams to produce mini documentaries interrogating a selected symbol of power in their city. “In Malmö, we learned about the Rhodes Must Fall movement and how decolonizing pedagogies and acts of resistance were part of daily life for our partners.”
Why Is a ‘Sense of Place’ So Significant?
A sense of place helps students connect learning to lived experience. It transforms the city into a text to be read, questioned, and reimagined. In virtual exchange, this becomes even more powerful because students not only explore their own environments, but also learn to see them through the eyes of others.
“It’s not just about learning about other places—it’s about learning with others, through the lens of place. Students go, camera-in-hand, into the city to explore, sometimes connecting with their peers in other parts of the world while doing it.”
What Do Students Say?
“Students generally describe the city-oriented VE experience as eye-opening. They appreciate the hands-on, inquiry-based approach as well as the chance to engage with real-world issues. Many are surprised by how much they learn—not just about other cities and cultural contexts, but about their own local place and their own worldview. Still, students often call for more critical perspectives and deeper engagement with controversial issues.”
What Are the Challenges?
“One of the most significant challenges in place-based Virtual Exchange is supporting students in daring to engage in critical dialogue—especially when it involves sensitive or controversial topics. Exploring issues like power, privilege, resistance, colonial legacies, or social injustices can evoke strong emotions. For many students, this may be the first time they are asked to question dominant narratives or confront uncomfortable truths about their own or others’ communities.
“It’s not always easy to ask difficult questions—especially across cultures and in a second language. As educators, we need to create brave spaces where students feel safe enough to take intellectual risks but also challenged enough to gain new insights and grow.”
For the teachers, this involves careful scaffolding, and trust-building. It also means modelling openness, humility, and a willingness to sit with complexity and ambiguity.
“This is not easy, but if and when things work out, the conversations can be transformative.”
Final Thoughts
When combined with Virtual Exchange, PBE becomes a powerful model for ‘glocal’ learning—rooted in the local, connected to the global. It encourages students to explore their own communities with fresh perspectives, enriched by dialogue and collaboration with peers across borders.
“It’s about opening spaces for students to look closer, think deeper, and connect their local realities to global conversations—because there really is no global without the local.”