Learning on the Move: Walking as Pedagogy

Professor Ruth Penfold-Mounce, University of York

Walking as a research method has a long-established history across Social Science (Pink, 2008; O’Neill and Roberts, 2019)  and in the Arts and Humanities. There is also an established industry focused on sightseeing guided walks focused on historical or cultural sites often in urban settings. However, adopting walking for its pedagogic values as an immersive teaching and learning tool is relatively novel. 

I have worked with a range of colleagues including academics, PhD students, museum curators and an undergraduate intern to launch two self-guided podcasted walks around the city of York. These walks are research-informed and embedded into undergraduate modules. First years get their criminological imaginations inspired on the York Crime Walk (O’Neill et al, 2021) whilst third years encounter death and dying as dark tourists on the Death and Culture Walk (DaCWalk). 

Learning on the Move
The intention of learning on the move through self-guided podcasted walks as a pedagogic innovation is twofold. Firstly, as an aid for teaching creatively and secondly, to support teaching for creativity. Adopting walking as a teaching and learning tool stimulates the imagination and develops an active learning experience (Penfold-Mounce, 2023). It draws on walking as an immersive embodied knowledge where understanding is grounded in bodily experience. For students this is an opportunity to experience and be transformed by affective knowledge (Johnson, 1989).

Completing the walks by visiting the 9-10 stopping points around York whilst listening to the podcasts immerses the walker in the cityscape. The sights, smells and sounds embed podcasts into the imagination, consolidating knowledge. Perhaps nowhere is this more evocative than at the cholera burial ground outside the York Railway station.

Image: York Death and Culture walk Map

Benefits of the Urban Classroom
Learning on the move and turning York into an urban classroom has reaped educational benefits including a student saying: “I would describe myself as a visual learner, thus, the DaCWalk…inspired my thanatological [study of death] imagination because I could envisage the history and conceptualise the theory right before my eyes”.  Additionally, effective communication about sensitive topics is displayed in seminars and creativity through podcast and reflective writing assessments. An unanticipated benefit of the urban classroom is the emergence of a strong shared learning culture as students rarely walk alone but with peers. Learning on the move as a group reveals the importance of conviviality in immersive learning. 

Beyond the benefits to undergraduate student learning has been the walk’s usefulness as a tool to inspire aspirations of Higher Education at widening participation events. The walks have also been used to demonstrate teaching and learning at University of York Open and Visit Days. Prospective students gain a taste of what they will learn and get to know the city in which they could potentially live. The podcasted walks are also available to the public and are promoted annually through the York Festival of Ideas. 

Adopting Pedagogic Walking
Although podcasted walks have many benefits there are admittedly challenges to overcome. A key challenge is simply getting students to go on the walk and not just listen to the podcasts in the comfort of their rooms. Tying the walk to the assessment has improved engagement as well as getting students to take pictures on their walk and to share experiences in class. Students have even come up with a work around for peers who are ill or can’t walk the entire route – they have taken them along on their phones by video call!

Although the Crime Walk and DaCWalk are specific to York  other scholars and cities have adopted learning on the move including Irelands Feminist Walk of Cork. Learning on the move offers Higher Education an innovative pedagogic tool and also a route to public engagement. It’s time to leave the shelter of lecture theatres and adopt urban classrooms.

Professor Ruth Penfold-Mounce is Deputy Head of Sociology Department at the University of York where she has responsibility for the strategic development of learning and teaching. Ruth is a SFHEA and is a passionate advocate for creative and immersive pedagogies and public engagement with Higher Education.

@deathandculture

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References

Johnson, M., 1989. Embodied knowledge. Curriculum inquiry, 19(4), pp.361-377.

O’Neill, M., Penfold-Mounce, R., Honeywell, D., Coward-Gibbs, M., Crowder, H. and Hill, I., 2021. Creative methodologies for a mobile criminology: Walking as critical pedagogy. Sociological Research Online, 26(2), pp.247-268.

O’Neill, M. and Roberts, B., 2019. Walking methods: Research on the move. Routledge.

Penfold-Mounce, R., 2023. Mobile Death Studies. The Routledge Handbook of Museums, Heritage, and Death.

Pink, S., 2008. Doing Sensory Ethnography. London: Sage