Place-Making

[Page 594]Place-making is a way of conceptualizing and describing how people make meaningful spaces for learning and action in relation to their bodies, minds, and interactions with others, and the natural and designed environment. Place-making highlights both agency and mobility in learning out of school in that people do not passively experience the spaces through which they travel, work, and live but actively learn and co-construct meaning in and through these spaces, changing and (re)producing them as places of personal importance and learning. Places are not intrinsically meaningful but are made meaningful through people’s engagement with them.

One way theorists have described this phenomenon is to consider the inside of a house, which can feel secure, intimate, haunted, prison-like, or magical depending on one’s interactions in ...