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Walking the city: a strategy for inclusive learning and critical engagement beyond the classroom
Dr Steve MillingtonManchester Metropolitan UniversityNorth West STEM Project
Photo: Richard Thorp
MMU’s Birley Fields Proposal
MMU’s Birley Fields Proposal
Photo: the author
Introduction
• But it’s just walking isn’t it?
• Walking in Manchester
• Key activities and findings
• Preliminary conclusions
Photo: ExHulme website
But it’s just walking isn’t it?
• Walking in popular culture
• Ingold & Vergunst, 2008; Solnit, 2006; Sinclair, 2002
• Walking embedded into a wide range of practices
But it’s just walking isn’t it?• The figure of the flâneur
(Benjamin, 1929)
• Participatory research tool
• Mobile methodologies
• “go-along” (Kusenbach, 2003)
• Mobility and society (Cresswell, 2006; Edensor, 2000; Sheller and Urry, 2006)
Photo: Maureen Ward
But it’s just walking isn’t it?• A pedogical device for
learning beyond the classroom (Porter, 2008)
• Fostering deeper understandng
• Engaging non-traditonal learners
• Accessibile research and teaching device
Photo: North West Film Archive
But it’s just walking isn’t it?• Geography field work
tradition
– From the Cook’s Tour to critical field engagement
– Capacity of walking to explore the specificities of place (Pinder, 2008)
– “Urban experience from down below” (de Certeau, 1984)
– A sense of place
Photo: the author
Peace, Vote Robinson
But it’s just walking isn’t it?
“Places are coincidences of events, emotions, memories and artefacts remarkable for being simulataneous and connected” (Anderson and Moles, 2008)
Sensory geographies:Affect and emotionalMaterialities of placesSensorial experience of placeThe immanent and unexpected
Walkers “produce themselves in space at the same time they produce space” Simonsen (2008)
I'm a rambler, I'm a rambler from Manchester wayI get all me pleasure the hard moorland wayI may be a wageslave on MondayBut I am a free man on Sunday
From Manchester Rambler (Ewan McColl)
Walking in Manchester
Manchester legend – Benny Rothman
Walking in Manchester• Walking as resistance
• Walking and political protest– Ramblers Association and Mass
Trespass
• Psychogeography– Situationist International– Dérive or the drift– Manchester PsychogeographicUnit
• Continuing significance of walking based arts and political groups
– Urbis Research Forum– Loiterers Resistance Movement– Manchester Zedders– Manchester Modernist Society
Photo: ExHulme website
Key activities and findings• Since December 2009 six tours
completed + one more scheduled
• 120+ people
• Wide range of backgrounds from activists to senior MMU managers and support staff
• Mixed race, gender, sexuality, inter-generational
Photo: the authort
15
19 Princess Parkway (1971)
Key activities and findings• Contentious relationship
between Hulme and the universities
• Who is educating who?
• Shifting insititutional culture of the university
• Participation of senior MMU staff has been essential
Photo: the author
Key activities and findings“the process/rhythm of walking in landscape animating the brain the self in relation to it – in ways which generate emotive, affective and imaginative opportunities or demands or impulses” (Jones, 2008)
Intimacy
Interaction
Multiple knowledges
Beyond the classroom
Photo: the author
Key activities and findings• Themes arising
– rights of access– nature and open space– planning and community– democracy and decision making– Architecture and urban design– urban regeneration– community and its loss– history – w/c identity and heritage– Housing– creativity and space– Contested aesethics– Urban elites
Photo: the author
Conclusions• Public engagement benefits and
synergies, but uncomfortable positionality
• Educating the educators – changing insitutional attitudes towards university’s publics
• Critical value of walking as an learning and engagement device
• Repositioning geography as an academic discipline
• Need for continual monitoring and evaluation
Photo: the author
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