About the National Place-Based Education Conference
The mission of the National PBE Conference is to grow and support the place-based education community, to strengthen the field through shared experiences, insights and best practices, and to inspire the future of education to be deeply connected to place and local purpose.
Stream sampling during a 2023 PBE Conference Immersion Experience.
Great Lakes Stewardship Initiative (GLSI) organized and hosted the first Place-Based Education Conference in November 2011 to provide informative, inspirational content to support attendees’ efforts to be practitioners, resources, and leaders for environmental stewardship and place-based education in their communities. Two hundred people, the majority from Michigan, gathered at the Kellogg Center at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan, for that first conference. The conference has grown steadily ever since as the event connected and cultivated a national and, eventually, international community of place-based education supporters, educators, scholars, thought leaders, students, funders, and community-based organizations. As both GLSI and the National PBE Conference have grown, the event has become a critical gathering place to exchange best practices, resources, strategies, ideas and innovations that have grown and driven forward the movement to infuse education with meaningful place connections and local purpose.
Once an annual and now a biennial event, 2025 marks the 9th PBE Conference and the second held at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, MI. To date, the event has always been held at a various Michigan cities and institutions, with one of GLSI’s regional Community Hubs serving as local hosts to help create meaningful place-based connections between conference attendees and the host community. The conference truly embodies the spirit of what it means to be place-based. As the conference and GLSI continue to grow, we are excited to consider where else the National PBE Conference may take place beyond Michigan.
The National PBE Conference is a special gathering that connects a community that believes in the power of our connections to place to increase joy, relevance, and meaning in education. It is an opportunity to clarify a shared sense of purpose, expand networks and toolkits, and deepen our collective resilience to teach and learn through the places we are most connected to—our communities. We invite you to join our PBE Conference community and expand your connections across the U.S. and beyond.
The Traveling Dialogues offered a unique mix of experience, engagement, and reflection that are almost always missing at education conferences and really made the experience exceptional. The wonderfully facilitated conversation with the folks from the Boggs Center really got people thinking and talking about difficult questions, offering an opportunity for personal transformation that carried over into the individual traditional/forum sessions…please KEEP that sort of thing up, it changes people.
This is one of the most impressive and inspiring conferences I’ve had the opportunity to attend in my many years of conference attending. Why? Because I loved that it embraces easy ways to use the natural resources surrounding you—wherever you are—for fun and inspiring environmental education and stewardship for students. The energy from teachers was inspiring and infectious!
I loved the community feeling at the conference. Even though there were hundreds of participants, the conference had a ‘summer camp’ feeling where everyone was supportive, and hugs and high fives were the norm. As a biologist and educator, I loved the balance of analytical science presentations, common sense nuts and bolts presentations, and ‘how to’ approaches in PBE. I came away from the conference with renewed vigor that place-based education has deep roots, shown by the attendance of participants from around the world and around our nation.
