Sense of place is important because it can
build a pathway towards self-motivation for learning. It is no mystery that motivation is a good
tool for learning. If you can motivate
students to take charge of their own learning they will go further then we can
imagine. I hate talking about my judo
career but I learned so much from judo.
I am able to apply so many aspects of judo into other areas of my
life. I feel a big part of my “success”
in my judo career has a lot to do with my motivation. When I first started I was uncoordinated and un-athletic.
I was told by the veteran players on the team that I had no natural talent at
all. Certain events happened in the span
of one month in the beginning of my judo training and it sparked a motivation
in me that I couldn’t control. I trained
hard and dedicated myself to my training to the point where my parents had to
tell me, “You know Jerrik, there is more to life than training and winning.” My sensei’s poured knowledge on me and I couldn’t
wait to gain more, to learn more. Being
able to apply what you learn in one subject (in this instance, for me judo) and
applying it to other real world scenarios and subjects should be the aim of
teaching. I apply things I learned in
judo like perseverance, the ability to analyze situations, and strategy to my
everyday life. What if we could instill
this type of motivation into students?
Ok, maybe not to the extreme that I took it, but maybe close to it. How could we achieve instilling this motivation? I believe the answer is in building students sense
of place through place based education.
For me, at a particular time in my life, the
judo mat was my strongest sense of place.
It’s where I felt I belonged and where I rooted my learning. To qualify to compete in high school
tournaments you had to submit grade checks weekly that had passing grades
marked on them by your teacher from each class.
I passed all my classes and found motivation to study through my desire
to compete. A sense of place that leads
to a motivating desire to learn could, and should, leak into other areas of students’
lives.
There will most likely be multiple senses of
place for any given space and moment, by our own (or others) different
understandings or perceptions of a place based on different dimensions of the
place and time. It would be difficult to
find a place that incorporates only one of Gruenewald’s five dimensions of
place. You would be particularly hard
pressed to not find all five of Gruenewald’s dimensions of place in a
classroom. The different dimensions and
multiple sense of place are there whether we choose to acknowledge them or not. Students bring so many different dynamics
into the classroom. When students walk into a room they come with their own
views, ideas, dreams, culture, social and home life. The simple act of introducing a new student
affects everyone’s sense of place of a place.
The new student definitely has a different sense of place from the other
students. The multiple sense of place is
evident in Tara’s story of students investigating their city and air
pollution. The student’s perceptual,
sociological, ideological, political, and ecological sense of place radically
changes from one moment to the next.
Everyone in that story had a different sense of place at a given moment.
For the students it was home in every
sense of the word and what parts in the city are of importance and to their home
view were different. Teachers meant well
and hand nothing but good intentions in trying to take a serious health concern
and use it as a teaching space, which was their sense of place. I guess to me the situation went like: Teachers
came to the students house and said, wow this is a great house let’s make it
better together, and students heard wow this is a great house, but your house
has flaws.
The aspect of
multiple sense of place I am beginning to find most interesting and also
troublesome for teaching. Is the aspect
that everyone has a different sense of place and hence there are multiple
senses of place at any given time and that sense of place is in a constant
state of change. Every event, whether
big or tiny, shapes and molds a sense of place for each individual. Now as a teacher we need to constantly be
aware of the changes and be flexible to adapt our teaching and lessons to
continually be in tuned with the changes, especially with incoming classes. What worked for one instance or for one class
may not work for the next. If we begin
to go off on a tangent and let one sense of place take precedence and overshadow
the multitude of senses of place we will then begin to negatively affect the
space of learning. What I perceive as
important or interesting in a space may not be important or interesting to
students due to the fact that there is multiple sense of place for a single
space.
