What Is ‘A Sense of Place’? Bloomington Students Explain — and Share Theirs The 2024 “Sense of Place” project by students at the Academy of Science and Entrepreneurship is here!

Students in the American Studies class at Bloomington’s Academy of Science and Entrepreneurship were asked to identify their sense of place. Each student made a video to learn about their special place’s “larger connection to our shared home of southern Indiana.” Above, a screenshot from the video by Andjoli C. Badger.

by Rachel Bahr, English Teacher

This year’s sense of place project was implemented with American Studies, a co-taught class that explores U.S. history through the lens of universal themes. This allowed us to look at where we live, its rich history, and how it has shifted over time. As in the past, we started this project watching Breaking Away, a movie that makes students talk excitedly among themselves when they see something they recognize. We took a field trip to Lower Cascades and learned about FDR’s New Deal and its impact on our local work force and opportunities, then and now.

Without fail, there are some students who at first believe they do not have a role or place in our local environment, until they understand that even if it’s their grandparents’ land that has been in their family for decades, or the local park around the block from their childhood home, or their childhood home itself, we all identified a place, examined it, and learned about its larger connection to our shared home of southern Indiana. We all have a sense of place. Ninth grade student Andjoli C. Badger articulates this perspective much better than I.

by Andjoli C. Badger

A screenshot from Andjoli C. Badger’s Sense of Place video.

This land we walk on has seen and held change over centuries. First, the slow and beautiful change stewarded by thousands of years of Indigenous peoples tending the land generation after generation. And later, the change the land saw when settlers took the land. And now, the immediate changes we see in the shifting landscape, the buildings flying up rapidly and the roads being built on top of each other.

But where do we find our place in all of these histories? How can we shift our thinking to recognize our own role in our community? How can we become closer to where we live than further from it?

This is where a sense of place comes in. A sense of place is the feeling we get when we return to the spaces where we can be the most open with ourselves, where we know who we are — or feel comfortable not knowing. A feeling of oneness, of being fully present, that we find blooming in our chests when we step foot on the places that mean so much to us. It is also the knowing that we are not the first ones to step foot here; the knowing that the spaces we move through have not always looked this way, and are quickly growing into something new even as we speak.

For many people, we get this feeling when we return to the places we grew up in, the places we have gotten to know in different ways over the years. This could be the garden behind your family home, the friend you stayed with when your mom was in the hospital, the lake that you used to take walks with your little siblings after school every day.

We have compiled these virtual tours of the places we feel a sense of place within in hopes that, through learning more about where the people around you feel the most like themselves, you might learn to listen to the intricacies of your own heart and therefore others’ hearts as well.

We hope you enjoy our work and perhaps even think about your own sense of place.