“Awakening to the world as phenomenon”

This chapter considers how phenomenology can be useful pedagogically to understand the central importance of places in human life and for improving those places, particularly via architecture and environmental design. Max van Manen’s five existentials of human life and David Seamon’s six place processes are used to illustrate how phenomenological concepts can provide a pedagogical means for locating and disclosing aspects of environmental and place experience typically taken-for-granted and therefore out of sight. Architect Christopher Alexander’s “pattern language” is discussed as one useful pedagogical tool for envisioning architecture and environmental design as place making. The chapter concludes by discussing how a phenomenology of place and lived emplacement contributes to a place-based education incorporating active learning, community engagement, and environmental stewardship. The chapter argues that a pedagogical focus on place is considerably different from the dominant neoliberal emphasis on standardized testing, curricula unrelated to locality, and an instrumentalist knowledge too often in the service of a global capitalism that undermines natural and human places.