Place-based Learning and Change of Sense of Place: Educational program in a historic town

Daxi is a famous historical town of north Taiwan, because of the preservation of the historic buildings of streets. It began to build the home identity of the locals from the 1990s. By the community participation shown the ancient culture of the town successfully, it became an attractive place for the tourism in Taiwan during the recent ten years. While the industry and lifestyle in the town are changing, it has a bearing on the power of the community groups. The life in the town is not convenient and low quality. Young people were left to work outside the community, and the social relation is to harden into stone. By the time goes on, the sense of place is changing to reconstruct the “Local.” While the industry changed, the culture is much different from the traditional, and the young people have a different dream of their home community. We found some alienated feeling in young people of the town from the workshop discussion of the “Dasi-field school”.However, in recent three years, the eco-museum project by participating with the local people, and it stimulated some learning programs in the community. In these two years, some young people would like to stay in the community and have some creative businesses. The occurrence of educational activities facilitates the translation of local knowledge. Through this study, we tried to understand if local people's sense of place was changed, as well as young people's identity of community life.In this action research, firstly, we had data analysis about the community learning-landscape of the community. Finally, we want to discuss how learning programs make sense of the neighborhood change and flow. Based on experiential research, we came up with a learning landscape model, in an attempt to construct the interactive relation between learning and community identity. Furthermore, we presented a new partner relation between community development and the design of educational courses.