Learning and Living in Place

By Julia Stuble,
Graduate Student

Have you ever used a word so often, or stared at it for too long, that it seems misspelled? I have, and did this week with the seemingly innocuous word “place.” This was the first week of my team’s two week stint in a class titled “Principles of Place-Based Education,” and we used the word “place” a lot.

On Monday morning, the fabulous April Landale, also the director of our Kelly Campus, began our class with a brainstorming session on “place.”
I had already glimpsed a sense of the deeper meaning endowed upon this word beyond its usual vague uses. This was not a course defining “place” as in “We ate at the little place on the corner.” Instead, this plain word embodies an entire realm of philosophic meaning, as well as educational theory application and community planning.

I was introduced to the grander uses for this little word last year, when reading about the “Power of Place” campaign and seminar in Jackson Hole a few years earlier. Thus, when April had us brainstorm associations and definitions for “place” at the start of class, I knew she wanted more than the apparent blasé geographic definition.

The following is a list of the associations our class decided were encompasses within “place”: topography, watersheds, geology, community, local culture, regional politics, fauna and flora identification, climate, industry and commercial bases, demographics, cultural history as well as earth history, land management and much more. In short, well, there is no short answer. Place encompasses a vast array of concepts, issues, arguments and studies.

Looking at the list, I wondered how we were going to even dive into it. The class was structured experientially, and on Wednesday it finally hit home. Place, I found, was an idea integrated so well into my lifestyle, I overlooked its importance.

On Wednesday, after discussing our childhood connection to places on Monday, and history of Jackson Hole on Tuesday, April led us out on a hike. The point was simple: to poke around the South Fork of Ditch Creek several miles up from campus. We were sitting in a meadow in the late autumn’s dusky sunshine enjoying a breeze that just matched the temperature so that in the sun, it was refreshing and in the shade, a bit chilly. We had poked around all morning – at a deer carcass, at scat, identifying plants and tracks, at snow patches left in the shade. In a circle, April asked us how we felt and when Meta responded “Here I am,” in an existential sense, it made sense. It was similar to what I had written, and looks of agreement from others confirmed the same feeling. I have often disliked speaking of feeling grounded. It is often over-used, over-discussed. This may be regressive, but I like to think of it in the sense if you have to ask the price, you cannot afford it. As in, if you have to discuss how to discover it, you will never get it. But undoubtedly, this was a good time to, delicately, throw the word out. The class was grounded in that meadow, in the Gros Ventre Mountains, in the Jackson Hole region. There was a contentedness in feeling comfortable with the fauna and flora, the weather pattern, being prepared with supplies in our packs; the whole concept of that, forgive me, place.

I think it must be an instinct. After all, as foragers millions of years ago, it had to be advantageous to survival to know the plants to eat and not eat, the ways to hunt, how weather would change and how to prepare, where water was and how to get back to camp. Do we search for a grounded place in a modern, fragmented society simply because of a million-year old itch?
I read Desmond Morris in high school, and though a more critical reader now, I still hearken back to his basic ideas about the “human animal.” Morris expounded on the idea of safety in numbers as a primal need for our survival in our ape days. We need small family groups of ten to thirty, he hypothesized. In today’s society with millions of strangers in cities and extended families now extended geographically, we still express this need, he wrote, in forming multiple small tribes – like clubs, religions, sports teams, groups of friends. We need to connect to the strangers around us.
City planning has often not taken this into account. I highly recommend Thomas Hylton’s Save Our Land, Save Our Towns, a theory that centers community planning around the idea of making a community. This means towns that are walk-able and bike-able to work, school and groceries, and bringing people together face to face, not hood to bumper. With this structure, Hylton has found benefits of crime reduction, increased cleanliness and care for the town, increased opportunities for education and culture, and happier citizens.

But other than redesigning a town, what can bring cohesion to a fragmented group of a couple of thousand apes (sorry, people)? How about “place”? In class, we read essays on the importance of place in mid-childhood (remember your secret fort, house, hide-away). Place is safety in knowledge, and a key connection for a child. And an adult, I’ll argue. Fragmented society is uncomfortable: not making eye contact on the street, not knowing where your water or food comes from, not understanding the basic geologic and biologic factors that decree much of your day to day life, even in a city. Do these disconnects rebel against our instincts? It definitely feels more right to greet your neighbor every morning than to stare straight ahead from the moment of exiting your house to entering your safe, enclosed, lonely disconnected module. If people are connected to the lands and place around them, and everyone is connected to that same idea of place, can there exist more potential for understanding and connection between humans? Without harping on the philosophies of place, Hylton found this true simply by providing a common “place” shared by all citizens of a town.

Perhaps our sense of place is an instinctual drive for survival on several levels (food gathering, protection for children) as well as a method to bring people together through understanding and shared experiences.
I may understand it better now, and I’m using it to define that sense of “rightness” in the meadow, and in countless other moments of utter contentedness, but I’m pretty sure I am spelling it wrong.