Place-Based Inquiry Anchor Agent Skill

Anchor curriculum learning in a specific local place with connections to community, culture, and identity.

Context cost
5.8k tokensestimated from the bundle, loaded when it triggers
Bundle
1 file · 23.4 kBtext throughout, nothing executable
Licence
not declarednone named by its author
Last change
—v1.0
Servers it uses
Noneruns standalone

What it does

Anchor curriculum learning in a specific local place with connections to community, culture, and identity. Use when connecting academic content to students' local environment and heritage.

What this skill changes about the agent has not been set out here as a list. Its SKILL.md, shown below, says it in the author’s own words.

castagno-brayboydecolonisinggruenewaldindigenous-educationlandlocalplace-basedstewardship

The skill itself

A skill is instructions the model reads, so you can see what you are getting: below is the start of its SKILL.md. The front matter loads with every session, the body loads when the skill triggers, and the whole file comes with the install.

SKILL.md23.4 kB · preview
--- # AGENT SKILLS STANDARD FIELDS (v2) name: place-based-inquiry-anchor disable-model-invocation: false user-invocable: true effort: medium # EXISTING FIELDS skill_id: "global-cross-cultural-pedagogies/place-based-inquiry-anchor" skill_name: "Place-Based Inquiry Anchor" domain: "global-cross-cultural-pedagogies" version: "1.0" evidence_strength: "moderate" evidence_sources: - "Castagno & Brayboy (2008) — Culturally responsive schooling for Indigenous youth: a review of the literature" - "Gruenewald (2003) — The best of both worlds: a critical pedagogy of place" - "Sobel (2004) — Place-Based Education: connecting classrooms and communities" - "Smith (2002) — Place-based education: learning to be where we are" - "Bang, Medin & Atran (2007) — Cultural mosaics and mental models of nature" input_schema: required: - field: "curriculum_content" type: "string" - field: "local_place" type: "string" optional: - field: "student_level" type: "string" - field: "subject_area" type: "string" - field: "indigenous_connections" type: "string" - field: "community_knowledge_holders" type: "string" - field: "access_constraints" type: "string" output_schema: type: "object" fields: - field: "place_based_inquiry" type: "object" - field: "place_knowledge" type: "object" - field: "multiple_knowledge_systems" type: "object" - field: "action_dimension" type: "object" chains_well_with: - "culturally-responsive-teaching-designer" - "ubuntu-collective-knowledge-task-designer" - "phenomenon-based-unit-anchor" - "awe-wonder-experience-designer" teacher_time: "4 minutes" tags: ["place-based", "Indigenous-education", "Castagno-Brayboy", "Gruenewald", "local", "land", "stewardship", "decolonising"] ---
70# Place-Based Inquiry Anchor
71
72## What This Skill Does
73
74Designs an inquiry anchored in a specific local place — using the place itself as a primary text and teaching resource, connecting academic curriculum to what can be learned from direct engagement with the local landscape, community, and environment. The approach draws on place-based education (Sobel, 2004; Smith, 2002), critical pedagogy of place (Gruenewald, 2003), and Indigenous education research (Castagno & Brayboy, 2008; Bang, Medin & Atran, 2007). The critical insight is that places are not just locations where learning happens — they are themselves sources of knowledge. A local river teaches ecology, chemistry, geography, history, and civic responsibility simultaneously. A neighbourhood teaches economics, sociology, architecture, and community. Place-based inquiry honours multiple ways of knowing a place — scientific observation, historical research, cultural memory, Indigenous knowledge, and direct sensory experience — treating them as complementary rather than hierarchical. The output includes an inquiry design anchored in a specific place, identification of what the place teaches, a framework for honouring multiple knowledge systems, and an action dimension where students take responsibility for their relationship with the place. AI is specifically valuable here because connecting curriculum standards to specific local places requires mapping academic content onto place-based opportunities — a cross-referencing task that benefits from broad knowledge of both curriculum and local geography.
75
76## Evidence Foundation
77
78Castagno & Brayboy (2008) reviewed the literature on culturally responsive schooling for Indigenous youth, finding that effective education for Indigenous students centres PLACE and LAND as fundamental to learning. In Indigenous epistemologies, knowledge is not abstract and portable — it is situated in relationship with specific places, and understanding the land is inseparable from understanding oneself. While this research focuses on Indigenous contexts, the principle that place is a source of knowledge has implications for all students. Gruenewald (2003) proposed a "critical pedagogy of place" that combines critical pedagogy (examining power, equity, and social structures) with place-based education (learning through local engagement). He argued that education should help students both INHABIT their places (develop deep, caring relationships with local environments) and DECOLONISE them (critically examine how places have been shaped by colonial, economic, and political forces). Sobel (2004) documented place-based education programmes across the United States, showing that students who learn through local places demonstrate higher academic achievement, stronger community connections, and greater environmental stewardship than students in conventional classrooms. Smith (2002) categorised place-based learning approaches: cultural studies (local history, traditions, arts), nature studies (local ecology, environmental science), real-world problem-solving (investigating local issues), internships and entrepreneurship (community engagement), and induction into community processes (civic participation). Bang, Medin & Atran (2007) demonstrated that Indigenous children who learned through culturally situated, place-based approaches developed more complex and accurate ecological understanding than children who learned ecology through standard Western science curriculum — suggesting that Indigenous ways of knowing nature are epistemologically rich, not deficient.
79
80## Input Schema
81
82The teacher must provide:
83- **Curriculum content:** What students need to learn. *e.g. "Ecosystems and food chains — Year 7 Science" / "Local history — Year 8 History, how our area has changed" / "Data collection and analysis — Year 6 Mathematics" / "Geographical fieldwork — Year 9 Geography, physical and human geography of a local area"*
84- **Local place:** The specific place. *e.g. "The canal that runs behind our school — it was built in the 1790s, fell into disuse, and was recently restored by a community trust" / "The park at the end of our road — an old Victorian park with mature trees, used by many different community groups" / "The high street — a mix of independent shops, chain stores, and empty units, reflecting economic change in our town"*
85
86Optional (injected by context engine if available):
87- **Student level:** Year group
88- **Subject area:** The curriculum subject
This is a preview of SKILL.md. Download or install the skill to get the whole thing.
In the file
SKILL.md3,291 words
Files1
Licencenot declared
Why you can read it

Nothing in a skill executes. The client loads the text and the model follows it, so a skill can be audited the way a runbook is — by reading it.

What it costs in context

Skills are not billed by the call. They are paid for in context: every token the instructions occupy is a token your code, your diff and your conversation cannot use. Here is what this one takes and when it takes it.

≈800
always loaded
The name and description, so the model knows the skill exists and when to reach for it.
5,050
on trigger
The instruction body, read only when the skill fires.
2.9%
of a 200k window
Ten skills this size would take about 29% of the window before you open a file.
050k100k150k200k context window

5.8k tokens, estimated from the bundle at four bytes to the token, held for the rest of the session once it triggers. Heavy. Teams tend to install this one per project rather than globally, and load it only when the job comes up.

Servers bill, skills cost

A server charges by the month. A skill charges once per session, in context, and then keeps charging it for as long as the session lives.

Before and after

The same question, put to the same model twice: once as it comes, and once with these instructions loaded.

No worked example has been published for this skill yet.

The procedure it runs

The procedure has not been set out here step by step. It is in the body of its SKILL.md: the start of it is shown above, and the whole file comes with the install.

Prose, not code

These steps are written for a model to follow, not executed by a runtime. It can still be told to skip one, and it will say so when it does.

Servers it uses

None. This skill calls no MCP servers at all.

Everything it needs is in the instructions, so it works in a project with nothing connected — the model reads the file and changes how it works with what it can already reach.

Its SKILL.md does not declare which tools it asks the agent for, so what it touches is whatever the instructions themselves ask for — read them before you install it.

What it asks for
Writes filesnot declared
Network accessnot declared

This SKILL.md carries no allowed-tools line, so neither is declared. A skill grants no permissions of its own — it can only ask for tools your client already has.

What it will not do

Every skill is narrow, and the useful ones say where they stop. These are the jobs this one is the wrong tool for.

What this skill is not for has not been published here. Nothing is implied by that: it is a section the author has not filled in.

What is in the bundle

1 file, 23.4 kB on disk. A bundle is text throughout: the instructions the model reads, plus the templates it fills in.

  • SKILL.md23.4 kB
What is not in it

No dependencies and nothing executable: a skill is text the agent reads, so the bundle is 1 file you can review in full before installing.

Install

Installing copies the bundle into your project. Nothing runs at install time — the files sit on disk until the model reads them.

# Place-Based Inquiry Anchor · 5.8k tokens when loaded · macOS, Linux mkdir -p .claude/skills && t=$(mktemp -d) && curl -fsSL -o "$t/bundle.tar.gz" https://mcprush.com/api/skills/place-based-inquiry-anchor/bundle.tar.gz && tar -xzf "$t/bundle.tar.gz" -C "$t" && [ -d "$t/place-based-inquiry-anchor" ] && { [ ! -e .claude/skills/place-based-inquiry-anchor ] || { mv .claude/skills/place-based-inquiry-anchor "$t/.previous" && echo "Previous copy moved to $t/.previous"; }; } && mv "$t/place-based-inquiry-anchor" .claude/skills/ && echo "Installed .claude/skills/place-based-inquiry-anchor"
On Windows, or any OS with Node 20+
npx mcprush@latest skill add garethmanning/place-based-inquiry-anchor

Windows PowerShell says 'running scripts is disabled on this system'? Run Set-ExecutionPolicy -Scope CurrentUser RemoteSigned once, or type npx.cmd instead of npx (codex.cmd, gemini.cmd, grok.cmd likewise). PowerShell 7 needs neither. Writes to .claude/skills/place-based-inquiry-anchor/ in the current project. For every project instead, run mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && t=$(mktemp -d) && curl -fsSL -o "$t/bundle.tar.gz" https://mcprush.com/api/skills/place-based-inquiry-anchor/bundle.tar.gz && tar -xzf "$t/bundle.tar.gz" -C "$t" && [ -d "$t/place-based-inquiry-anchor" ] && { [ ! -e ~/.claude/skills/place-based-inquiry-anchor ] || { mv ~/.claude/skills/place-based-inquiry-anchor "$t/.previous" && echo "Previous copy moved to $t/.previous"; }; } && mv "$t/place-based-inquiry-anchor" ~/.claude/skills/ && echo "Installed ~/.claude/skills/place-based-inquiry-anchor" (macOS, Linux) — or add --global to the npx line. The curl line replaces .claude/skills/place-based-inquiry-anchor/ only after the download succeeds, so files left there by another skill of the same name, or by an older release, do not mix in. A copy already there is moved aside, not deleted, and the line prints where.

Which clients pick it up on their own

A skill is a folder of text. Most of these read a skills folder and pick it up without being told; the rest take the same folder another way — an upload in the app, a parameter on an API call — and then choose it by its description just the same.

Claude Code.claude/skills/
Claude DesktopCustomize › Skills
ChatGPTSkills › Create › Upload
Cursor.cursor/skills/
VS Code.github/skills/
Codex CLI.agents/skills/
Gemini CLI.gemini/skills/
Grok Build.grok/skills/
Microsoft CopilotSkills › Upload a skill
PerplexityComputer › Skills › Upload a skill
DeepSeek Harness.dsh/skills/
Zed.agents/skills/
Devin Desktop.devin/skills/
Windsurf (legacy).windsurf/skills/
OpenAI Agents SDKInstructions or sandbox Skills
HTTP / APIa request parameter
This release
Version1.0
Publishedno release date on file
PriceFree
Referencegarethmanning/place-based-inquiry-anchor

Versions

v1.0 is what is on the shelf; no release here carries a date. Instructions change more often than APIs do — a skill can be rewritten entirely without anything it depends on moving.

v1.0
  • No earlier releases have been published to the marketplace.
Pinning

The install command always fetches the release that is current the day you run it — v1.0 today — and cannot ask for an earlier one. The copy on your disk does not change until you run it again.

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