Creating a Sense of Place in School Environments

How Young Children Construct Place Attachment

Sun-Young Rieh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138339002
• eBook ISBN: 9780429805738
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Creating a Sense of Place in School Environments guides its readers to the characteristics that tend to generate a sense of place through children's vivid descriptions of their school and provides a body of critical information that can be employed to design a better school environment that can imprint cherished childhood memories.

The childhood school environment calls for special attention regarding the sense of place it creates. The sense of place in childhood both affects children's current quality of life and frames their lasting world view. It is well known that children's cognitive development is closely related to their place attachment to their surroundings, and that children's adaptation to a given environment depends on how such place attachment can be created. Therefore, it is natural that people's identity in the world is the accumulation of their experience of place while in childhood.

Cross-checking between the imprint of adults' memories of places in school and children's current "lived experience" of their favorite school place confirmed that certain spatial configurations, which the author herein refers to as "place generators" can generate positive attributes of physical settings that construct a sense of place and last as lifelong memories. It is an ideal read for academics, students, and professionals.

1

Introduction

Place refers to a particular location in the world given meaning through the emotional attachment of an individual or group. When he explained the meaning of place in terms of existential space, Heidegger wrote that spaces receive their being from places and not from “space.”¹ Place is an essential property of man’s existence, and sense of place is a basic human need that gives meaning to the world. Space can be transformed to a place only when it acquires definition and meaning.

After the emergence of the humanistic critique of geography in the late 1960s, the concept of sense of place was invigorated by phenomenological researchers in the 1970s, such as Norberg-Schulz, Relph, and Tuan.² Apart from the quantitative and positivistic approaches of conventional science, the descriptive nature of the phenomenological approach opened a new paradigm in returning to foundations of meaning, things, and experience in the fields of human and built environments. With this alternative approach in research method, the topic of place has attracted considerable attention from researchers in related fields over the last three decades. Edward Relph, author of the influential book Place and Placelessness, observes the reclamation of contemporary place through three different perspectives. One is a desperate reaction against modernism in the form of romanticism and nostalgia; the second is the attempt to improve the environment by making pleasant, arresting spaces; the third, more radical concern with place is the attempt to understand its existential importance in order to establish new types of places, thereby avoiding the replication of outdated approaches.³ This third approach is the one that most contributes to the improvement of human environment and needs more attention. The research topic that I am dealing with in terms of sense of place and quality of environment takes this final position based on the belief that sense of place can be created through physical artifacts, as “the existential purpose of building (architecture) is to make a site become a place, that is, to uncover the meanings potentially present in the given environment.”⁴

Discourse on sense of place is often related to children’s experience of the environment. It is known that a person’s identity is related to their experience of place, especially during the formative years when personality is being shaped.⁵ Even if an adult’s complex experience of a place differs from that of a young child’s, the individual schemata of adults are the result of the accumulation of a structure of experience and conceptual knowledge that has been formed from childhood. Christian Norberg-Schulz, a prominent scholar in phenomenology in architecture, referred to the research of psychologist Jean Piaget on child development to explain the nature of existential space, which is the main concept of place.

Piaget demonstrates that it is not possible to arrive at any cognition without having an emotional relationship to the object, without understanding it in a spatial and temporal context … Man gradually constructs the image of a structured world, in which the notion of space, that is, existential space, forms an integral part. This implies that the child learns to recognize, that is creates a world based on a system of similarities, and also that certain things are associated with certain places. The development of the concept of place … is therefore a necessary condition for adaptation to a given environment.⁶

In addition to this influence of place attachment on environmental adaptation, adult perception in a place is sometimes infused with an emotional surge from early experience.⁷ It means that the structure of adult perception of and the emotional tie to a place is directly related to the childhood experience of that place. The centrality of place attachment in a child’s cognition development, in terms of adaptation to the extended environment, is the root of the adult notion of sense of place. Therefore, sense of place in childhood contributes to the present quality of a child’s life and leaves a permanent imprint, identifying and framing the development of one’s relationship to the world.

However, regardless of the importance of physical environment and a child’s attachment to it during their development, the subject of childhood place attachment has only been investigated relatively recently compared to other topics in developmental psychology.⁸ As every social environment is in a physical environment, it is not only critical as a medium for children’s learning but also for their emotional lives. Spaces and places are fundamental considerations in the study of the development of human behavior and experience.⁹

However, the long-term effects of different qualities of place experienced in childhood remain a question to scholars in environmental behavior study. Thomas G. David and Carol Simon Weinstein saw the difficulties of this question in the lack of simultaneous research on the interplay between specific environmental factors, individual characteristics, and developmental outcomes.¹⁰

The attempt to link childhood place to adult notions of it can be found through several approaches, such as autobiography and the memory sketch. In an analysis of places of childhood in twentieth-century autobiographies, Louise Chawla reported that while a few authors barely mentioned or entirely rejected their childhood places or origins as dangerous, filthy, chaotic, or barren, most authors cherished these places, as the places formed the adults’ self-images.¹¹

If writing about childhood place with detailed description is one of the clues that reveal the qualities of place in childhood, the memory sketch is another approach that deals with the visual characteristics of childhood place. Sketches on childhood place allow us to imagine visual abstracts that might be impossible to express in writing. Through these two approaches we can get tentative representations of childhood place as it is experienced and imprinted. Therefore, it isn’t much of a leap in logic to conclude that a good memory place is vivid enough to be described in detail, either in written or sketched form, allowing us to trace back to the physical qualities of fondly remembered places by adults. We then investigate the degree and modes of awareness of the childhood place through the frames of the child’s developmental stage, if not the whole nature of that embedded memory place.

Some scholars are skeptical about the research on the nature of a good childhood place, as Moore asked: “Is it important that adults remember the places they knew as a child? …What is the difference between an adult who is able to record rich and memorable images, and someone who cannot?”¹² My answer to this question is that childhood place imprinted in adult memory is directly related to quality of life. If we accept the importance of the physical environment in child development and agree on the power of gradual accumulation of experience in a place, the imperative of improving the quality of place in childhood cannot be overemphasized. Most importantly, developing a sense of place is reported to depend on the previous bonding with the immediate surrounding during middle childhood. The sense of place born during childhood develops into an adult sense of place that leads to a commitment to preserve the integrity of communities.¹³

By linking adult memory places and children’s current experiences of special places, we can integrate the study of physical environment and its developmental outcome which has been fragmented due to the lack of communication among child-environment researchers as Thomas G. David and Carol Simon Weinstein expressed:

Educators studying classroom physical setting have had little contact with the environmental psychologists who conduct parallel investigations. Similarly, researchers based in schools of architecture who are primarily interested in the improvement of design may never encounter child development scholars investigating spatial cognition in the laboratory. There are also a substantial number of practitioners, such as designers and therapists, who have developed experientially based notions of the role of space in children’s lives but who may have never interacted with any of the above groups.¹⁴

As the major research gap is in the lack of mutual understanding of how children acquire the environmental values they express, research focused on the analyses of children’s sense of place from diverse disciplines based on descriptions of children could bridge the gap.

Among the domains of childhood, the home is the most important place. However, school and outdoor neighborhood play areas become more important in the socialization process in terms of child development.¹⁵ Among these three, school is the only place where social, cultural, and physical factors intermingle, and it is where most of a child’s day is spent. Vygotsky’s emphasis on the interaction among children as an essential factor for cognitive development also supports the importance of school environment. This emphasis expanded perspective for the educators who had been dominated by Piaget’s theory, which assumed children’s knowledge is constructed from personal experience. Children spend increasingly more time in school, including after school hours. Their schools become second homes. Therefore, the sense of place at school becomes even more important. With rich environmental involvement, children develop better cognitive skills and create a more positive sense of identity. However, the topic of school as a place of developmental shift and engraving childhood memory is rarely mentioned, as school is usually considered a place of learning. Even these acts of learning are reported to be possible only when children are emotionally attached, as recent research in the field of neuroscience has shown in the article “We feel, therefore we learn: The relevance of affective and social neuro science to education”.¹⁶ The effects of emotional aspects on learning and the importance of an emotional environment suggest that the issue of providing a school with such qualities cannot be ignored.

The goal of this book is to locate characteristics that enhance sense of place in elementary school environments. School places currently being experienced by children and memory places of adults will be explored by tracking the vital mechanisms of the school environment in adults’ memories as well as children’s schema to pull out the possibility of converting the school space to the memory place. The investigation includes aspects of children’s attachment to places in school settings, qualities of place, children’s behavior settings, and modes of environmental awareness. The research assumes that children can develop attachments to particular places when there are factors that create or enhance a sense of place.

This investigation takes place mainly in Hawaii, where a unique and mild climate provides an ideal setting to study children’s interaction with the environment; the last chapter updates the research by comparing two relatively different cases. Sketches of school guide maps and favorite places along with written descriptions and interviews are used as mediums to communicate the nature of children’s places in school settings. Surveys on adult memory places and children’s favorite places in school settings will rev...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Praise Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Sense of Place
• 3 Characteristics of Place for Children
• 4 Positioning and Framing
• 5 School as a Memory Place for Adults
• 6 Lived Experience of Schoolchildren
• 7 Changes in the School Environment
• 8 Conclusion: Toward a “Sense of Place” in School Environments
• References
• Index