Walking as a Qualitative Methodology for Public Pedagogy

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 3:20 pm Four Seasons Ballroom 1
  In Roundtable Session: Methodologies: Revisiting the Old and Offering the New (Table 5)

Abstract

Drawing from my community-based, participatory walking research in San Jose Japantown (CA), I frame walking methodology as facilitative of public pedagogy, a term acknowledging the connection of education to vulnerable social conditions and public life. The in-depth walking tours revealed place-based narratives of lived, embodied, and historical precarity with the US practice of redlining and the WWII Japanese American incarceration. Implications are discussed in terms of how walking methods can be used as a pedagogical means of raising public awareness and inquiry into the ontological and embodied precarity of racialized bodies and places, and how public pedagogy is not just a cultural transmission of norms from society but an opportunity to examine and disrupt such norms

Author

• Kimberly A. Powell, Pennsylvania State University