The Art of Perambulation: Walking, Reading, and Artistic Expression as Public Pedagogy

• In Event: Roundtable Session 12
  In Roundtable Session: Walking as Sensory Methodology

Abstract

Objectives
This paper highlights the perambulatory approach to reading, writing, art and public pedagogy practiced by the Hamilton Perambulatory Unit (HPU) (Sandlin et al, 2010). The HPU is a group of graduate students, educators and artists based in Hamilton, Ontario. Members of the HPU meet monthly to walk through alleys, along the Bruce Trail to waterfalls, and through the city’s quickly gentrifying downtown. Unlike book clubs or art discussion groups, which are normally held indoors and in static seating, the HPU brings explorations of literature and art to life in public space, through perambulatory discussions, and methodologies of walking.
During each walk participants practice sensory exploration of the city/self in conjunction with a pre-read text, artistic notion, or philosophical work. Each gathering is “led” by a different educator, artist or writer. Inspired by the ancient Greek Peripatetic (walking) School – there is no set curriculum, and no school fees for members of the HPU (Barnes, 2000).

Theoretical Framework
As a writer and teacher of English, I draw from a long history of peregrination in literature (Wordsworth, Dostoyevsky, Baudelaire, Kafka, Li Bai, Ikkyu, Woolf) to contextualize the importance of walking in literary traditions – for writers in their practice, and as represented in their texts. Peregrination means to ‘travel abroad’ in Latin. The acts of reading and writing require readers and writers to embark on a journey or “shift ground” in order to understand or create a text (Davidson in Kent, 1994). Many theorists have highlighted the relationship between walking and writing: Michel de Certeau discusses how writers perform “…itinerant, progressive, and regulated practice – a “walk”(1984:134); Tim Ingold (2007) compares reading and storytelling to wayfaring.
The HPU’s approach to reading involves discussions of pre-read literary texts and artistic concepts while walking. The HPU approaches composition and publication in the spirit of a “flâneur” or situated observer: composing ideas conceived through perambulation and sensory exploration of the city (Benjamin, 2002).

Methods, or Modes of Inquiry
Using walking methodologies alongside arts based research (Springgay et al, 2005) I am mindful of my senses and embodied self as I collect data. I also use Erin Manning’s “Research Creation” to document the “continuous production” of art and new pedagogical perspectives that occur during the HPU’s perambulations (Pink, 2009; Manning, 2008; Massey, 2005).

Data Sources or Evidence
Art projects, images and texts generated by the HPU “flâneurs” will be shared as evidence of research creation and public pedagogy enacted through public walking events (Manning, 2008). Flâneurs have often played subversive and pedagogical roles in the history of writing and art, and marked the changes of their cityscapes through publications (Benjamin, 2002).

Significance
The HPU project reveals how the historical relationship between walking and artistic practices can be used to explore current educational notions of public pedagogy, knowledge production, and artistic expression. The use of research creation and sensory ethnography as methodologies contribute to emerging field of situated and continuous research in education.

Author

• Sarah E. Truman, University of Toronto - OISE