Significance of Place in the Lives of Recreation Practitioners

This paper is a narrative inquiry into the experiences of two recreation practitioners, as well as the author, as they each learned how to live in relationally ethical ways in recreation practice. By drawing on the field texts of the author as he participated in a community garden project as a researcher-practitioner over two years, this paper shows that place matters when contemplating how lives come together in recreation practice. The purpose of this paper is to show that place is part of the fabric of our relational space as practitioner and participants lives come together in the meeting place of a recreation program. Place shapes who we are and are becoming, particularly when it is understood simultaneously with temporality and sociality (i.e., a narrative understanding of place).