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

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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

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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