What the ‘Sense of Place’ Project by ASE Students Can Teach Us

Each fall since 2016, Rachel Bahr’s English 11 class at Bloomington’s Academy of Science and Entrepreneurship have completed a class project called “Sense of Place” and shared their work with Limestone Post. This year’s students created videos portraying a variety of unique places: a horse stable, a family homestead, a limestone mill, Dunn Meadow, Community Kitchen, Rose Hill Cemetery, the B-Line Trail, Jackson Creek Middle School, and Monroe Lake. Pictured is a screenshot of Woolery Mill from Ambrose Lee’s video.

Introduction by Ambrose Lee and Nicole Dewar:

Limestone Post paired up with The Academy of Science and Entrepreneurship (ASE) for a project titled “Sense of Place.” After watching the 1979 Oscar-award-winning movie Breaking Away, the class of English 11 — led by outstanding teacher Rachel Bahr — was tasked in creating an informational video about each student’s unique sense of place.

Now, you might be wondering what a sense of place is. It is a very simple concept. Some people say that a sense of place could be someone’s “safe place.” Your sense of place might be a beach, or a piece of land, or even an abandoned building. For one of the students, Woolery Mill is their sense of place. This student can go there whenever something is stressing them out and clear their mind. Another way to think about a sense of place is a personal landmark. It’s a relationship to the place and its memories that live in our mind that makes a special landmark just for you, even though it may also belong to thousands of others.

Bloomington, over the past decade, has started to become unrecognizable to some longtime locals. Some major places have been either demolished, moved, or just altered enough to make the place no longer feel like what it once was. Take the Chocolate Moose for example. The business of the Chocolate Moose remains in its original location, just without the gabled roof or parking lot with movies projected in the summers, and without a tangible location to attach to some of these specific memories. Over the past few years, Bloomington has been expanding, and for better or worse, some places are being altered. So, we took the opportunity to capture our places in our own personal time capsules, and we would like to share them with you. The Academy is pleased to present the 2021-2022 Sense of Place videos. We hope you enjoy our work!

[Editor’s note: Limestone Post is proud to have been a part of this project with Rachel Bahr’s English 11 class at The Academy of Science and Entrepreneurship since 2016. You can view previous “Sense of Place” projects here. This year’s students created videos that are by turns insightful, compelling, nostalgic, poetic, thought-provoking, and inspirational. In alphabetical order, the students are Lizzy Busch, Nicole Dewar, Peyton Chitwood, Cecilia Deckard, Makeyla Gentry, Ambrose Lee, Dylan Livingston, Emma McArtor, Zachary Silkworth, Levi Speers, and Rory Sullivan. Thank you for your excellent work!]