Why In-Place Learning Matters
Earlier this month we released our forecast, VAMONDE Insights on the Future of Cultural Travel. This article below is the first of four macro-shifts we believe will impact every cultural institution in a massive way. Subscribe to VAMONDE Insights and get these delivered directly to your inbox (almost weekly).
Say you are a fan of Ernest Hemingway and decide to learn more about him. Your first step, most likely, is to open up Google and type in Ernest Hemingway. Soon you are immersed in the world of Hemingway, dropping from one rabbit hole to another as you learn more about him. All sitting in the comfort of your living room.
Now imagine another scenario — you know Hemingway was born in Oak Park and spent most of his boyhood in an old Oak Park house. So you trek out to Oak Park to visit this home, which is now a museum. As you stand in the beautifully restored interior rooms, you learn that Hemingway comes from quite a well-to-do Chicago family and that his childhood played a big role in his transformation into the Nobel Prize-winning author we all know and love.
As you walk from room to room, you learn about how the home, the people around him, and the neighborhood influenced him. You stop for a while in the dining room and wonder what it must have felt like as a young boy keenly listening to his grandfather (fondly called Abba) as he recounted stories of his childhood to Ernest and his sister. It’s an amazing experience — the walls, the rooms, the furniture, all come alive in your mind. Computers, books, and printed material simply cannot replace the power of being there.
Many researchers, including myself, have spent a large chunk of our time understanding why it is that place contributes so much to learning and how new technologies can connect people to places in ways unimaginable just a few years ago. Today, technologies such as geo-fences, augmented reality, beacons, among many others, can easily provide users information where they need it for access, consumption, processing, reflection, restructuring, and production of new information. Urban organizations have a large role in the narrative build out of places. These organizations, more often than not, already have the content, narratives, and information required to add to the physical space. As new technologies emerge to create richer contexts for planned as well as serendipitous learning in-place, it is incumbent upon these organizations to share this information in novel ways to their audiences. They should make it easy for a wandering user to stumble upon a space and have a totally new (and awesome) interaction with the narrative associated with that space.
This is important because within the education community, there is very little debate that informal and embodied learning is better than classroom-based learning. Elementary and high school students, often tend to retain more information when they are embodied in the context of the information. Embodied learning is frequently associated with high degrees of knowledge and skill development, which are both essential for long-term development.
Place is an important ally in all of this. It enables our memories to recreate and construct stories with the context that surrounds us. The walls, the floors, the pictures, the molding, the furniture, the smell, the sounds — all contribute to your recreation of Ernest Hemingway’s childhood in your mind. Another key aspect of learning is serendipity. Sometimes you go searching for a information because you know of it. Sometimes you just discover new information because you stumble upon it. Your curiosity about a building or a mural is piqued when you are standing in front of it — “what happened here?” When we move away from a place, this curiosity is no longer as strong or as powerful. This shared corporeality with place makes it an equal participant in the process of learning.
Without place, the story is only half complete — you depend on your mind to fill in the holes. Being ‘in place’ enables us to not just listen to the story but also unpack the nuances of the social, cultural, political, and environmental context that accompany the story. Human beings are embodied creatures — we use our body in conjunction with our minds to create and curate memories. These memories then serve as the source for our narratives and stories, and the more embodied these memories, the better our stories. This is why In-Place Learning matters.
