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Chapter 24
Implications of Sense of Place and Place-Based
Education for Ecological Integrity and Cultural

Sustainability in Diverse Places

Steven Semken and Elizabeth Brandt

Introduction

Emotional and intellectual estrangement – or even the outright eviction – of people
from places personally and culturally important to them is rampant in this time of
anthropic sprawl, economic globalization, and cultural homogenization. Placelessness
(Relph 1976) unmoors individuals, often with detrimental effects to self-identity and
well-being. Mass displacement, typically to suit the economic or political purposes of
others, removes aboriginal or historically resident populations, each of which pos-
sesses a diachronic collective memory of local environmental processes and cycles,
hard-won expertise in how to dwell sustainably in a place, and usually the most vested
interest in preserving that place. Contested places are the loci of past, ongoing, and
potential future conflicts and displacements, which threaten ecological integrity
(Nabhan 1997) and cultural sustainability (Cernea 2000) around the globe.
Place-based education, explicitly situated in the learner’s physical and cultural sur-
roundings, has been invigorated as a means of “reclaiming the significance of the local
in the global age” (Gruenewald and Smith 2008, p. xiii). This approach is now most
often practiced by educators in stable and secure places within the mainstream of the
developed world. However, place-based education whether offered formally in schools
or informally through public outreach offers unique benefits for troubled communities
in contested places, where ideas and opinions on the value and use of local spaces and
resources diverge, conflict, and defy reconciliation. Such conflict may be catalyzed or
compounded by people’s misconceptions or lack of functional knowledge of the
contested place, and these are exactly what place-based teaching and learning are
intended to address. Refugees who have been resettled in a stable but foreign place can
also be helped to bond with and live well in their temporary or permanent new home.
In the following, we begin with a summary of the nature of place and its relation-
ship to place-based education, mediated by sense of place: a construct that synthesizes
the human connections to place. We then review the evolution of place-based educational

S. Semken and E. Brandt
Arizona State University

D.J. Tippins et al. (eds.), Cultural Studies and Environmentalism, 287
Cultural Studies of Science Education, Vol. 3, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-3929-3_24,
© Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010