When Despair Grows in Us: Emotional Learning in (Trans)Formative Places

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Muffet

The paper examines how people’s endogenous emotional relationships with outdoor childhood or adolescent (trans)formative places shape emotional learning. Using phenomenology and participatory analysis, it revisits the formative places of four citizens captured through film to trace transformations in identity development, memory, anxiety, resiliency behavior, nostalgia, and loss. The findings describe attachment through feeling at home and fostering bliss, gratitude, pride, hope, and emotionality, suggesting that returning to such places can renew these relationships.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages18

Reading Time45 min

AccessFree to download

Abstract

Emotional learning through (trans)formative places

Hope vs. despair in environmental and social crises

Place-connection and emotional literacy intervention

Prior research on emotionality and place-identity

When Despair Grows in Us: Emotional Learning in (Trans)Formative Places Nicholas Richard Graeme Stanger, Huxley College of the Environment, Western Washington University, USA Abstract This paper considers a person’s endogenous and emotional relationships to outdoor childhood or adolescent (trans)formative places. By revisiting the (trans)formative places of four citizens and filming the experiences, I gained an understanding of how these places engage emotional learning. The emotional data were explored through phenomenology and participatory analysis. Places transformed my participants through identity development, memory and anxiety, resiliency behaviour, nostalgia, and loss. My participants related to places through knowing a place and being home, engendering bliss and appreciation, the development of pride and hope, and experiencing emotionality. Part of our emotional development is linked to our relationships to place because we are, in some ways, part of that place. Returning to (trans)formative places can rejuvenate our relationships to those places through our emotional reactions. Résumé Cet article explore les réactions endogènes et émotionnelles liées aux lieux extérieurs (trans)formateurs qui ont marqué l’enfance et l’adolescence. En revisitant les lieux (trans)formateurs de quatre citoyens et en filmant ces expériences, je suis arrivé à saisir la façon dont ces lieux engendrent un apprentissage émotionnel. Le vécu émotionnel est examiné avec l’apport de laphénoménologie et de l’analyse participative. Les lieux étudiés, associés à une foule d’expériences personnelles, comme l’anxiété, la perte et la nostalgie, ont transformé les participants en contribuant à la formation de leur identité et en favorisant leur résilience. Les participants décrivent ainsi leur attachement à ces lieux : ce sont des endroits familiers où ils se sentent chez eux, des endroits quileur inspirent divers sentiments comme lajoie, la gratitude, la fierté et l’espoir. Notre développement émotionnel est lié en partie à nos relations avec les lieuxpuisque, d’une certaine manière, nous en faisons partie. Retourner vers nos lieux (trans)formateurs peut nous aider à réactualiser notre lien avec eux par l’entremise de nos émotions. Keywords: environmental education, transformative places, endogeny, emotionality, panarchy theory, sense of place Canadian Journal of Environmental Education, 21, 2016 145 When despair grows in me and I wake in the middle of the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting for their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free. (Berry, 2010, p. 36) Western life seems obsessed with the binary of hope and despair. An allusion exists that hope or despair are the acceptable feelings we can have because of the hopeful/horrific lives of environmental and social crises/phenomena that humans and other-than-humans experience. This social dichotomy shows up in pernicious ways, whether it is horrors overtly articulated through the media (Voorhees, Vick, & Perkins, 2007) or more hidden within the hope and despair structures of our society (Kelsey, 2012) . Nevertheless, humans do not deal with feelings and needs wellin societies that are so focused on marketing and exploiting materialism (Rosenberg, 2003) . Wendell Berry’s (2010) acknowledgement of despair might act as an important nudge, as many of us working in the field of environmental studies or sciences tend to suppress the complexity of feelings experienced from and in our work. Berry presents his remedy to this despair by coming “into the peace of the wild things…rest[ing] in the grace of the world”and becomin

FAQs

What does the paper explore about emotional learning?

It explores how people’s emotional relationships with outdoor childhood or adolescent (trans)formative places engage emotional learning and reshape identity and feelings.

How were the emotional experiences studied?

The study revisits four participants’ (trans)formative places and films their experiences, then analyzes emotional data through phenomenology and participatory analysis.

What roles do place, hope, and despair play in the paper?

The paper argues that emotional development is linked to relationships to place, and it discusses how the hope/despair binary can be challenged by looking directly at feelings in and with place.

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Muffet