Place: Early Influences

I'm trying to wrap my head around the importance of space and place in learning -- an especially important thing in the Augmented Reality Gaming that I'm researching. But I've been having a difficult time understanding it, or maybe simply staying focused, while reading about it. Although I've got an MA degree in Writing/Litereature, I'm still much more of a visual person.

So I started to collect images of "learning environments" simply by plugging appropriate words and phrases into Google Images, and as I was skimming through the hundreds of images of schools and classrooms, I thought back to my early ideas of "places to learn" -- St. Paul's Lutheran School in Mt. Prospect, Illinois, where I attended church and school until 2nd grade. And I looked it up, and matched my memories with its images.

Since the school and church are right next to each other, and my family was deeply involved in both, I don't think I can separate them in their influence, but there's certainly a difference in the feel/presence of them, architectually-speaking. Check out the church images -- they're very dramatic, and remind me of the feelings of security, solidness, importance, and value of my early faith. Then look at the school images -- kind of blah in comparison. Although it's worse now, in my opinion, than it was when I went because they tore down and "rebuilt" the original part of the school that I attended that at least had big windows, and a feeling of grandeur (shown in the old picture next the original church, which was replaced by the current one in 1960). In trying to keep some of the architectual echoes of the original school, they made really ugly design decisions. Pity.