I suppose there are a few questions that could follow the title of this post… What is place? Can you have more than one meaning? Is place a tangible thing or an experience? Do you create place? How does place change? I’m not sure how to answer these questions or if they are in fact answerable. As I think about place-based learning and wrestle with ideas about it’s potential for students, I was challenged by a critical friend to reflect on what place meant to me. Hmmmm, hence the questions. I am happy to have these questions swirl in my head as they are deepening my interest in the exploration of place (based learning). As I dug into Naomi Radawiec’s thesis: Exploring our Experiences with Place-based Learning I was struck by the term embodied knowing. Naomi wrote it is “When you experience a place through your senses…through your body.” This was powerful to me; the notion that place is sensory spoke to my feelings about place being multi-dimensional and malleable. I wanted to think more about embodied knowing and found a conference paper titled Embodied Knowing: Getting Back to Our Roots and in the first paragraphs read:

Embodied knowing is our first and most primitive way of experiencing the world. As infants, in cultures around the world we learn first through our bodies. Yet, in western culture this way of knowing is de-emphasized as we enter formal school. We are made to sit in chairs and be still. In higher education this way of knowing is all but absent. It is as if we are being educated from the neck up.

My feeling is that there are deep connections between our sensory experience of the world and our conception of place. I think, for me, place is experience in and of the world. It is the connections to the sights, sounds, tastes, touches, smells, feelings of our surroundings, of our community, of our family. It is the weaving of these connections through time that shape our conception of place and continue to create it. Is then seeking opportunities for creating place the paramount work of education?

My bare feet leave the concrete and I step onto the worn, grooved timbers. My feet are moist with sweat and leave trailing imprints as the dust and sand clings to my soles. The high morning sunlight shoots through the x patterned lattice of the bridge walls and causes me to blink. The warmth cuts through the openings and caresses my left temple with every other step. I stop and turn toward the sun. I push my head through one opening just left of the mid pier. Looking straight down there are clam swirls, gently spiraling in the jet black of the water. The heat of the sun is on the top of my head, the cool of the water rising to my face. I push my shoulders through, then my arms one after another. I turn to my left side and pull my hip onto the edge. I teeter over the water in this prone position, pull my legs in, force them through, and in that moment twist and sit on the ledge. The bridge wants to let me go. I draw in a deep breath and shove off into the air that instantly rushes along my bare back. Only a split second to the loud rush of Guinness bubbles surrounding me, then silence. No direction, but I am moving. Forward? Up? My head breaks free of the surface and the silky water is moving me to where it wants me to go. Away. Kick, kick, kick and I slow. The current drags me to the coarse grey shield rock. I reach out and hold, my body swings around, my feet connect and I look up.