Remembering the Roots of Place Meanings for Place-Based Outdoor Education

Overview & Synopsis

Place-based education seeks to connect learners to local environments through a variety of strategies that increase environmental awareness and connectedness to particular parts of the world. The concept of place meanings encompasses the subjective ways people construct meaning through their experiences with an array of settings. Place meanings are personal, often with a human focus, and are open to interpretation, while place-based education tends to be framed more concretely within the particulars of local environments. In this article, the author argues that these two concepts can work together to broaden thinking around "place" as it relates to outdoor education pedagogy. The purpose of this paper is to promote the utilization of place meanings within approaches to place-based outdoor education by: (1) revisiting some of the conceptual and historical underpinnings of place-based education and place meanings to show similarities and differences between the concepts; and (2) presenting a synthesis of place meanings within place-based theory to inspire a useful approach to doing place-based outdoor education.