Abstract

Walking pedagogies is a new series of audio dialogues exploring pedagogy through conversation and walking. The project brings UAL staff and practitioners together to curate and lead meaningful walks rooted in specific London locations to share personal context and history. Drawing on walking ethnographic practice and psychogeography, these recordings become unique records of what it is to be a teacher at UAL in this moment and takes us out of the university to bring in wider environmental, political and historical contexts and issues. In this installation we would like to launch the first three walking dialogues as a collective listening event to allow audiences to experience aspects of the walks in an embodied way.

Session and activities

This will be an in-person session that allows participants to hear extracts of the three first walking pedagogies together as a collective listening event. Concurrently we will project images within the space to accompany the audio. These are either images from the walker’s archives or images that were taken during the walks themselves: of the participants talking as well as the locations, buildings, details they reference.

We will hear extracts of a walk from John Princes St to Soho, where Dr Manrutt Wongkaew walks with Carole Morrison and describes his journey from being a tailor in Saville Row to Senior Lecturer at London College of fashion and how his embracing of colour is a manifestation of how he brings ‘self’ within his teaching practice.

From there we will travel to West London, where Dr Gurnam Singh takes us on an autobiographic walk around Southall sharing experiences of his formative years that envelop the history of history of migration, workers movements and anti-fascist organisation that occurred in the area.

And then to South London where Rahul Patel guides us around Windrush Square in Brixton and describes the landmark events that precede and follow the uprisings of 1981 including the anti-racist education movement that pertains to the awarding gaps still persisting within Higher Education.

Walking pedagogies proposes a methodology that is intentionally embodied. It allows two people to engage in a dialogue, in motion; and to respond to each other and their environment in a fluid, dynamic and spontaneous way. It brings the city, the politics of space, the historical, the personal, the emotional into play. If Psychogeography is “the study of the specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals” then walking pedagogies embraces this whilst folding what is relevant to our pedagogies into the mix.

The resulting recordings are unique records of pedagogic practice at UAL in this moment that acknowledge wider environmental contexts and issues. The aim is that they lead us to more potent, personal and authentic insights into the dynamics of our practice, and what forms us as teachers. These recordings aim to embody and mirror the decolonial practices that we work by, by embracing chance, flattening hierarchy, centring the body and physically moving out into the communities that UAL exists within.