Placed based learning is a crucial aspect of Trans-formative experiences, rejecting the place-less quality of many modern educational environments. Facilitating a Sense of Place has several interrelated aspects to it:

• The place should be a living landscape of a myriad of socio-ecological relations, which hold a sense of wholeness and authenticity.

• Place experience entails openly sharing personal, family and community narratives bonded to the place, manifesting how the ‘genius loci’ or soul of the place has expressed itself.

• Sharing and developing intuitive knowledge of place. This might include describing a plant, or an outcrop of rock, without being able to put a name to either.

• Celebrating the place’s harvests, seasons, festivities, food and creativity!

In these experiences, the place itself has the role of facilitator rather than object. The main objective of facilitating a sense of place is to engage individuals more fully in the overall experience of landscapes, so that we can return with new and heightened awareness to our own ‘familiar’ places.

Our planned experiences are embedded in a socio-ecological context; thus pilgrimage across local landscape is a fundamental part of each program. With our varying approaches, our shared purpose is to open ourselves to, and to share, some of the socio-ecological realities that surround us all wherever we are: the culture-nature relationship and history of the land.