Walking A/r/tography: Primary and Secondary Students' Visual Cartographies of the Gondwana Rain Forest in Australia

• In Event: 63.054 - Mapping A/r/tography: Walking for Place-Conscious Pedagogies of Practice

Abstract

Objectives or purposes:
This work sought to establish a student-led network of researchers engaging walkography and a/r/tography as acts of inquiry into artistic, pedagogical, environmental and curricular practices, through engagement in a deep mapping of connections, ecologies and experiences of the Gondwana Rainforest site through the languages of Environmental Education, Art and creativity.

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework:
Working collaboratively through the lens of a/r/tography into terrtorialising concepts of affect and the carte or map as conceptualised by Deleuze and Guattari (1987) assembles and engages in a methodology of c/a/r/tography (Lasczik Cutcher & Irwin, 2017; Rousell & Cutcher, 2014), which leans wholly into ambulatory practices such as walking and painting. A walkography by its nature is a Peripatetic Inquiry (Lasczik Cutcher & Irwin, 2017), drawing from the Aristotelian peripatetic axiom, later adopted by Thomas Aquinas, which states Nihil est in intellectu quod non sit prius in sensu. Walking slows down the pace of thought, in a rhythmic awareness of sensations and perceptions as one becomes (more) cognisant, self-conscious and immersively engaged (see also Lasczik Cutcher & Irwin, 2018).

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry:
In this project, we mobilized sensorial knowing as an opening to innovative teaching and learning, and emergent geographies of self and other through walkographic inquiry by developing collaborative and creative student exchanges that address storytelling through geo-specific understandings of a/r/tography.

Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials:
The data events (Rousell, 2017) include maps created in visual diaries, sound scapes, video, photography, collaborative painting, and a public exhibition. From these events, a curriculum framing in the Arts and Environmental Education has been created and shared with our partner schools, with the concept of the walking classroom as a central pedagogical feature.

Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view:
The walkography aligns with c/a/r/tographies of collaboration and wayfinding in synergistic and philosophical modes of thought and abstractions of movement and encounter. However, the concept of the walkography as engaged herein, tilts more idiosyncratically towards walking, conceptualised as an assemblage of reverberative and resonating sensations, pedagogies, materialities, events, encounters and aesthetics (Cutcher, Rousell & Cutter-Mackenzie, 2015).

Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work:
Our inquiry focuses upon the pedagogic implications of movement with/in physical contexts, and how this contemporary engagement provides a platform upon which to reimagine the transformative potential of pedagogy as a public right that transcends borders and expands education to become more emergent and transcultural in the 21st Century. Our findings invigorate discourse by disseminating a vibrant array of art exhibitions, artworks, ecological maps, Indigenous knowings, digital archives, and (leveraging and working in coherence with the Mapping A/r/tography project) a multi-language book series, which encourage the public to appreciate the power of transnational storytelling through a contemporary remapping of historical underpinnings, thus promoting public engagement that acknowledges the global-local interdependence among individuals and nations.

Authors

• Lexi Lasczik, Southern Cross University

• Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, Southern Cross University