For the third straight year, students in Rachel Bahr’s English 11 class at the Academy of Science and Entrepreneurship have explored a specific place that has special meaning to them — from their own backyard to Griffy Lake to high above the city. In 15 immersive audio tours, they each share their unique sense of place. The class, pictured here, took a trip to the new Chocolate Moose location as part of the lesson on sense of place. | Courtesy photo
A sense of place: How is it defined? This is the third year 11th-grade students at the Academy of Science of Entrepreneurship have explored this very idea. Our English teacher, Rachel Bahr, introduced this project with the movie Breaking Away. It’s a movie set here in Bloomington, and, throughout the film, we saw many places most of us have seen before. We read Sarah Gordon’s Limestone Post story “Are Market Forces Ruining B-town’s ‘Sense of Place’?” about The Chocolate Moose being rebuilt and the havoc it caused for some Bloomington residents. The article suggests that if we continue to renovate and renew, the town will lose its sense of place. Our class took a walk down to the renovated The Chocolate Moose and there was a lot of conversation that it was now better than it was before.
After these introductions to the project, we were asked a simple question: “How can you, as a resident of Bloomington, share your ‘sense of place’ in an immersive audio tour?” We all got to work once we uncovered what our sense of place is. We gathered images and videos, recorded audio descriptions, and shared why this place was so important to us. We then edited it all together to create a short video tour. This project has different meanings for all of us, and we hope you enjoy exploring our sense of place!
—Trinity Fleck, English 11 ASE Student
[Editor’s note: As Trinity said, this is the third straight year that students in Rachel Bahr’s English 11 class at the Academy of Science and Entrepreneurship have completed a project for Limestone Post that reflects on “sense of place.” In 2016, we published ‘This Is Where’: 25 B-town Students Reflect on ‘Sense of Place’, which includes photos and written descriptions. And last year, we ran Teens Explore Their ‘Sense of Place’ in Video Project. Each of these assignments have shown how personal, poignant, and different each person’s sense of place can be.]
