Importance of sense of place and recognizing multiple sense of place

      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.