What follows is the text (and references) from a “walk-n-talk” I led this past Friday, March 15, on the University of Victoria campus.
Learning the Land: Walking and Talking in Place
2019 AGES Conferences (Association of Graduate Education Students)
Weaving Connections: Collaboration and Mentoring
University of Victoria, Victoria, BC (Canada)
Hello, and welcome! Please join me as: We acknowledge with respect the Lekwungen and Sencoten speaking peoples on whose traditional territory the university stands, and the Songhees, Esquimalt, and WSÁNEĆ peoples, whose historical relationships with the land continue to this day. Thank you.
My name is Maya Borhani: I’m a doctoral student in Curriculum & Instruction, pursuing research in poetic inquiry and pedagogy, drama in education, and intersections of lifelong, community education with learning from/on the land.
This research/workshop idea springs from my praxis within several arts-based methodologies, as well as auto-bio-ethnographic and life writing, performative methods (in poetry, drama, and dance), and critical intersections of curriculum theory, eco-pedagogies, and literary poetics.
During our walk this afternoon, I hope we can discover and deepen our relationships to and with the land around us. We will focus on heightening senses other than sight, pause for silent reflection, write, collaborate, and consider ways in which we might come to know the places where we live, work, and play more intimately. While walking, we will inquire into “the narrative nature of our worlds” (personal communication, Margaret McKeon, March 2018), and our experiences with, on, and in the land.
This idea of narratives of/on the land—the earth—and by extension, our lives lived upon the land, is, for me, a lifelong ontological commitment and epistemological imperative, expanding our idea of “story” away from that of the merely human, into other-than/more-than-human worlds, including that of the land itself.
My inquiries arise from the soil and roots of my own settler-newcomer/Iranian immigrant presence and ancestries in this place (and in Northern California, where I am from), as well as from living in a (post)colonial world in places that are still, yet, “place(s) of colonization” (McKeon, 2018), decolonizing and yet/still (re)colonizing simultaneously. Although much has been written by Indigenous scholars and from decolonizing perspectives on the subject of our relationships to land (McKeon, 2018), less work has been undertaken by non-Indigenous scholars on this subject.
My scholarly positioning rests in my passionate interest in cross-curricular/cross-fertilizing intersections between Western epistemological thought and Indigenous ways-of-knowing, between literary and oral cultures, between mythopoetics and deep ecology, between body/mind, heart/brain, and my own deeply rooted connection with and to the earth.
Today’s “walk-n-talk” method is modeled on the idea of a walking methodology (Ingold, 2008): paying close attention as we go: a pedagogy of listening to, and learning from and with, the land. When we listen to the land, we begin to approach, respectfully, the “wisdom that sits in places” (Basso, 1996), and to develop a critical awareness (eyes, ears, senses) for other ways of knowing and being.
Why does any of this matter? How do such concerns intersect with the panoply of daily life? What insights come while walking? What is the pedagogy of paying close attention? What can we learn from listening to the land? Can these insights be applied wherever we travel on this great earth, fostering an expanded praxis of stewardship and sustainable practices, ethos of care, conservation, and consciousness for all-ways-of-knowing?
I believe so, and thus, the impetus for our critical eco-pedagogical “walk-n-talk.” We’re going to practice moments of contemplation, the art of “living inquiry” (Meyer, 2010), or attunement to natural and material elements of the world around (within) you; we’re going to stop for a simple poetry writing practice (centered in our natural surroundings), and wrap up with a creative drama exercise, before we walk back to the SUB for 5:30 sessions!
So now let’s take our walk—walking, talking, breathing and learning with and from the land all around us, under our feet, in the sky above us—while learning/practicing new (old) ways of noticing and attending; what ethnographer Tim Ingold calls a “sophisticated perceptual awareness” (2000), cultivating “a direct and sensuous engagement with the world” (Chambers, 2008, p. 121).
Suggestions while walking:
- Walk off pavement as much as possible
- Please look, LISTEN, observe, SMELL, touch, notice: Try not to talk . . .
After our return from the walk, poetry writing, and “tableaux” drama exercises:
Conclusion: So how do we make room in our busy lives for deep (if momentary) engagement with land? Chances are, you probably already are (without thinking consciously about it): on walks to work, on the bus while looking out the window, if you’re noticing little things on the sidewalk, or in the branches of the trees, up above your head in clouds rolling by, then you’re paying close attention and coming into a literacy with the land. Just like we did, in our (somewhat brisk-paced!) meander across campus, in stopping to close our eyes and listen to the world around us; in choosing to stop for poetry (this is huge, politically and personally!); and perhaps best of all, for playing with drama, and each other, in a forested field where many other-than-humans could see, hear, witness and be a part of our unfolding drama of life on this great green-blue marble orbiting our sun. Thanks for joining me and taking part.
“When did our walk begin? When will it ever end? . . . Life itself is as much a long walk as it is a long conversation, and the ways along which we walk are those along which we live. . . walking is a profoundly social activity: that in their timings, rhythms, and inflections, the feet respond as much as does the voice to the presence and activity of others. Social relations . . . are not enacted in situ but are paced out along the ground” (Ingold & Vergunst, 2008, p. 1).
Selected Quotations from the Walk:
On Walking:
“[W]alking comprises a suite of bodily performances that include observing, monitoring, remembering, listening, touching, crouching and climbing. And it is through these performances, along the way, that . . . knowledge is forged” (Ingold & Vergunst, 2008, p. 5).
“[W]alking is an accomplishment of the whole body in motion . . . we tend to forget that the body itself is grounded in movement. Walking is not just what a body does; it is what a body is. . . walking [is] . . . thinking in movement [and] ‘foundational to being in a body’” (Ingold & Vergunst, 2008, pp. 2-3).[i]
“Movement . . . is not adjunct to knowledge, as it is in the educational theory that underwrites classroom practice. Rather, the movement of walking is itself a way of knowing. A knowledgeable person is distinguished from a novice not by the sheer amount of information packed into his or her head—information that would in any case be perpetually obsolescent in an ever-changing environment—but by observational acuity and an awareness of the consequences of actions” (Ingold & Vergunst, 2008, p. 5).
On Place:
“We describe the agency of place as a ‘call.’ Because place is more-than-human engagement, its call is unusual—it is not like a calling to a faith or profession, but rather a summons to encounter, dialogue, and relationship among the humans and nonhumans who share the landscape” (Larsen & Johnson, 2017, pp. 1-2).
“In 1917 the sociologist and philosopher Max Weber named ‘disenchantment’ as the distinctive injury of modernity. He defined disenchantment as ‘the knowledge or belief that . . . there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation’ . . . It found its expressions not just in human behavior and policy – including the general impulse to control nature – but also in emotional response. Weber noted that widespread reduction of ‘wonder’ (for him the hallmark of enchantment, and in which state we are comfortable with not-knowing) and the corresponding expansion of ‘will’ (for him the hallmark of disenchantment, and in which state we are avid for authority). In modernity, mastery usurped mystery” (Macfarlane, 2015, pp. 24-25).
“In May 2015, Oxford University Press revealed its ‘children’s word of the year’ to be hashtag. OUP had chosen the words based on its analysis of more than 120,000 short stories by children aged between five and thirteen years, submitted to the BBC’s ‘500 Words’ competition . . .
“’Nature words’ were present in the stories, but infrequently. Out of a total corpus of 53 million words, oak was the most popular natural term, though hardly ubiquitous (3,975 usages) . . . Down at the lower end, heading for extinction, were acorn (293 usages), buttercup (168), blackbird (167) and conker (155). As OUP concluded, ‘the stories showed new technology to be increasingly at the centre of children’s lives’, and their finding confirmed to me the need to keep the language of the living world alive in the mouths and mind’s eye of young people. Technology is miraculous, but so too is nature—and this aspect of the world’s wonder seems under threat of erasure in children’s narratives, dreams and plots” (Macfarlane, 2015, pp. 344-345).
On Play/”Play” (Drama):
“Play is integral for reveling in embodied, more-than-cognitive ways of knowing and cultivating ecological imagination through “attentive practices of thought, love, rage and care” (Haraway, 2016, p. 56)” (Flynn & Reed, 2019, pp. 134-135).
“[T]he three elements of place, the play, and the people (actors and audience) interrelate and illuminate one another in moving and provocative ways. Time allows these elements to coexist and converse, creating an experience that engages imagination and emotion in an intensified inhabiting of place. Unifying artistic, ecological, and historical sensitivity to a specific locale, the project fosters a richly embodied, lived experience of landscape . . . this heightened experience can lead to a new awareness of the natural environment and of our ethical responsibility to it” (Popov, 2019, p. 82).
“Imagination is an agentive perception that bridges inner and outer worlds (Abram, 1996) and the space in which creative critical thinking occurs (Sewall, 1999). Cultivating an ecological imagination is a process of becoming through sensually perceived realities, drawing from times before and after, allowing liminal affects to be incorporated into ideas and thoughts that might become embodied realities” (Flynn & Reed, 2019, p. 134).
The following reference list breaks from traditional APA format by including mention of Margaret McKeon, doctoral scholar and poet at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, whose workshop on walking with and writing the land at the 6th Biennial International Symposium on Poetic Inquiry in November, 2017, inspired the conception of this walking, writing, and dramatizing with the land workshop. Thank you, Margaret.
References
Basso, K. (1996). Wisdom sits in places. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press.
Chambers, C. (2008). Where are we? Finding common ground in a curriculum of place. Journal for Canadian Association of Curriculum Studies, 6(2), 113-128.
Flynn, A. and Reed, A. (2019). Building ecological ontologies: EcoJustice education becoming with(in) art-science activism. In Art, ecojustice, and education: Intersecting theories and practices (R. Foster, J. Makela, and R. A. Martusewicz (Eds.), 124-140.
Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the chthulucene. Durham, UK: Duke University Press.
Heidegger, M. (1971). “ . . . Poetically Man Dwells . . . “ Poetry, language, thought, A. Hofstadler (Trans.), pp. 213-228. New York: Harper & Row.
Ingold, T. and Vergunst, J. L. (2008). Introduction. In Ways of walking: ethnography and practice on foot, T. Ingold and J. L. Vergunst (Eds.), 1-19. Hampshire, UK: Ashgate Publishing Limited.
Larsen, S. C. and Johnson, J. T. (2017). Introduction. Being together in place: Indigenous coexistence in a more than human world, S. C. Larsen & J. T. Johnson (Eds.), 1-22. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Macfarlane, R. (2016). Landmarks. London: Penguin.
McKeon, M. (2017). Centring land in poetic practice to explore reconciliation. Unpublished doctoral research statement, Margaret McKeon, personal communication, March 15, 2018.
Meyer, K. (2010). Living inquiry: Me, my self, and other. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 26(1), 85-96.
Popov, B. (2019). The Uncle Vanya project: Performance, landscape, and time. In Art, ecojustice, and education: Intersecting theories and practices (R. Foster, J. Makela, and R. A. Martusewicz (Eds.), 82-94.
Endnote:
[1] Sheets-Johnstone (1999), p. 494—‘foundational to being in a body’—as cited in Ingold & Vergunst (2008).
Living Poetically 