Moving towards inclusion and connection: practitioners’ conceptualisations of walking pedagogy
Walking pedagogy may meet students’ needs as they engage with nature and their local community
Walking pedagogy is an understudied form of nature-based learning that could be accessible and useful for teachers. Therefore, this study interviewed 20 practitioners of walking pedagogies in order to understand why they take students on walks, what purposes those walks serve, and what opportunities, drawbacks, and trade-offs they perceive with walking pedagogies. In doing so, the researchers hoped this study would encourage practitioners to take up walking pedagogy and engage with more critical thinking about the more-than-human world.
To investigate the practice of walking pedagogy, the researchers recruited teachers who had shared walking pedagogy hashtags over social media to participate in the study. They recruited and interviewed twenty practitioners from the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Chile, and Singapore. These interviews were transcribed and analyzed thematically to answer why teachers took up walking pedagogy, what purposes those walks serve, and what they perceive to be the opportunities, drawbacks, and trade-offs of walking pedagogies compared with other educational practices. For the purposes of this study, the researchers defined walking pedagogy as “the practice of using walks (or rolls, cycles, hikes, or other types of journeys that involve physical movement) for educational purposes.”
This study yielded three overarching themes: work that doesn’t feel like work, accommodating trauma and adapting practice, and connecting to place. First, the practitioners perceived walking pedagogy to be effective because it did not feel like typical academic work to children. Second, participants understood walking pedagogy as trauma-informed practice and as more inclusive or accessible than conventional school experiences. Third, participants perceived walking pedagogies as connecting children to their local communities, encouraging environmental stewardship, and promoting more civic behavior.
These results show that practitioners see walking pedagogies promoting inclusion and connection – both connections with humans and the more-than-human world. However, these results are also limited because 16 of the 20 practitioners were either American or Canadian. Practitioners in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand more readily linked walking pedagogies to indigenous relationships with the land and critiques of settler colonialism. Based on these teachers’ perceptions, walking pedagogy may be a way to engage students with nature and their local community and meet the needs of those who have experienced trauma or feel alienated from conventional schooling.
Citation
Friedman, S., Morrison, S. A., Rickards, A., (2025). Moving towards inclusion and connection: practitioners’ conceptualisations of walking pedagogy. Children's Geographies
