“Where we play Cheetahs!”

“Sense of place.”  What does this mean?  Putting it simply, it can refer to a meaning attributed to a place as influenced by our interactions with it.  We, in partnership with Learning and Engagement at deCordova, have been thinking and collecting observations of the children as they make this unique museum and sculpture park a place to call their own. We’ve spoken about how we’ve observed the children drawn to those “spaces in between”, the taken for granted elements of this environment that hold interest for the children.

We’ve also discovered however, that a particular “place” holds strong in the hearts of the children in Studio Purple.

“It’s where we play Cheetahs. That’s where there are lots of acorns.” -Spencer

“It’s at the tunnels…” -Eleanor
“Where we go up the building and where we’re down and the tunnels are up.” -Madeline P.R.

“We go up the stairs and then down the other stairs and then it’s a really long staircase so at the end of the stairs at the little circle space and there’s a bench.” -Eleanor

We have visited this particular place in the park on many occasions and throughout the changing seasons.  “While space is location, a place is used by humanistic geographers to describe our attachment to specific locations.” (Cresswell 2013)  Another way to consider this, our specific street address determines the location of our house but place describes where we feel at home.

Sensing the children’s emotional attachment to visiting this part of the Sculpture Park, we proposed to them to determine through their words, play and drawing what they might want visitors to know or seek when they visit this place, their place.

"There's the bench and there's the mountains and there's acorns." -Spencer
"These are the stones. These are the acorns. This is the bench. And this is the tree with the nest with the bird." -Hannah
"It's a bench." -Ada
"I'm writing it my way. There's lots of acorns. Now I'm writing there's lots of rocks you see. There, I writed it. Do you see the words?" -Eleanor
"These are the things that we jump on." -Britton (pathway)
"The circle space." -Margot
"I drew a nut!"-Sylvie
"The rocks. There's different kinds of leaves." -Henry
"I have the sky and trees and the grass." -Madeline P.R.
"The plants and that's a tree and that's bark and that's an acorn and there's no tops and that's the bench." -Callen

“The motivation to interact with the environment exists in all children as an intrinsic property of life, but the quality of the interactions is dependent upon the possibilities for engagement that the environment provides.”

Anita Rui Olds, 1979