As We Walk Together: caminata to Reveal and Remember

• In Event: Cultivating Caminata Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning while Walking with Emplaced and Embodied Knowledges in Texas

Abstract

Purpose
This paper shares reflections on caminata as a pedagogical movida. This intentional, place-based, and relational pedagogy invites pre-service teachers to walk through historical areas in the city. Through four years of implementation, this practice reveals the ways students witness, remember, and begin to co-theorize place, often drawing from personal memory, community relationality, and community practices.

Theoretical Framework
Caminatas are grounded in Indigenous and decolonial frameworks that position land, memory, and relationality as co-educators (Cajete, 1994; Simpson, 2014; Donald, 2012). We, as participants, are not passive observers but become active witnesses to the layers of history embedded in place.

Methods
To document these noticings, we engaged in pláticas with various colegas—a conversational and relational method grounded in Chicana feminist and Indigenous oral traditions (Delgado Bernal, 2002). These informal exchanges were documented through field notes, voice memos, and drawings. We participated in collective meaning-making— reflecting not only on what was said, but also on the emotions that surfaced through bodily sensations when listening to students’ spontaneous comments, shared noticings, or personal memories that were newly evoked. Through reflective journaling and the use of photographs as visual testimonios, we created a critical pause for interpretation and reflection, allowing us to note how our ways of seeing are shaped by who we are and where we come from (Calderón, 2014). As part of the caminata, students keep a photojournal and use images to share their noticings, draw personal and cultural connections, and revise prior assumptions or social commentaries they once held as true.

Warrants for Point of View
Caminatas also serve as a space. Seeing their professors—and themselves—outside the institutional classroom disrupts expectations. It creates a threshold moment that allows for new kinds of knowing and relations between preservice teachers and their instructors. Similarly, Lugones’ (2003) work on “world-traveling” and decolonial coalition invites us to consider how these walks challenge students to shift perspectives, especially in relation to race, class, and space. Drawing on funds of knowledge (González, Moll, & Amanti, 2005), caminatas help illuminate the cultural assets and lived expertise present in local communities. By being physically present in the neighborhood and engaging with community members—whose skills, knowledge, and cultural practices are fully visible—students begin to develop a new understanding of capability and expertise.

Significance of Work
This paper argues that caminatas are not merely experiential activities or community walks; they are intentional pedagogical movidas—strategic acts of resistance, restoration, and relational learning (Cotera, 1977). They restore relationships to place, resurface stories buried by gentrification and policy, and foster a sense of collective responsibility among pre-service teachers. caminatas offer a pedagogical encounter where learning is not confined to institutions, but instead emerges from being in relation—with land, with people, and with history. This nurtures a critical consciousness in which schooling is understood as inseparable from land, culture, and the layered histories that live beneath our feet (Wane, 2008).caminatas foster critical racial consciousness and challenge colorblindness ideologies (Brown & Brown, 2011). Shifting placeless paradigms of teacher education by offering a vision of pedagogy that is grounded in the everyday resistance and resilience of communities.

Author

• Patricia Núñez, University of Texas at Austin