The paper examines the importance of emotion in place responsive education. Vygotsky's concept of perezhivanie captures the unity between emotion and cognition and the importance of heightened personal experiences in learning about self, others and place. We found (Renshaw & Tooth, 2014) that well designed place-responsive pedagogies can evoke quite emotional and heartfelt responses from children. But there is evidence from recent research that environmental educators often downplay emotional experience, preferring to focus children’s attention on the cognitive and scientific aspects of the experience. (Van Poeck,  Goeminne, & Vandenabeele, 2014). This division between emotion and cognition was critiqued by Vygotsky (1998) as fragmenting the unity of human consciousness. He proposed an alternative where development occurs in episodes of transformation and reconfiguration of consciousness The key objective of this paper is to examine the relevance of Vygotsky’s concept of perezhivanie to environmental education. We apply perezhivanie to the analysis of children’s accounts of their learning during organised school excursions to natural places. We propose that perezhivanie includes both heightened experiences and meta-experiences involving reflection, reinterpretation and re-contextualisation. In the paper each of the accounts from the students (n=100) is coded and analysed to reveal the type and depth of emotion and learning they report. Our initial examination of the data has revealed a depth and eloquence in students’ responses suggesting that their experiences can be interpreted as moments of perezhivanie. The paper expands the range of Vygotskian concepts deployed to study learning and teaching. Perezhivanie captures the unity between emotion and cognition and foregrounds the importance of heightened personal experiences in instigating episodes of transformative learning for students. The paper is also significant in proposing that heightened emotional experiences provide rich opportunities for reflection and re-imagining the future if students are provided the chance to engage in first-hand experience in nature and share their insights with others. 

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