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Places are expressive, dynamic, and responsive beings voicing themselves at different scales ofemergence. Placefields are the sites of research at the complex nexus of peoples, cultures,
geography, experience, mythology, and place history in terrapsychology. Children are open and
receptive to these expressive qualities of place, understanding these place emanations through
the context provided to them by place-based educators and other adults. This four-month study
at Lowell National Historical Park utilized terrapsychological inquiry to explore youth
connection to the historic industrial placefield of Lowell, Massachusetts as experienced by
learners and educators, reproduced through youth placefield encounters, and iterated through
self, community, and as culture across scales. The arts-based research method of terrain
weaving empowered this research to connect with complex pattern languages of Lowell,
surfacing the symbolic repertoire of place, the somatic and psychological components of youth
place encounter, the deep patterns of place that rise through the researcher, and the expansive
states of consciousness that are catalyzed through complex place relationships. The difficult
histories placefields perform reproduce their traumatic and historic woundings in the visiting
psyche. At the same time, the underlying resilience, strengths, and gifts of places with difficult
histories are vital assets to be liberated. The experiential and embodied elements of field trips
make them powerful intersections for troubling the ways historic narratives are constructed.
This research concludes it is possible to radically redesign field trips and recontextualize
histories to provide a nourishing, regenerative place encounter by adopting complex,
expansive, and agential understandings of place.