WALK
How can walking, conversation and art be used to create communal self-organised learning practices and alter group dynamics?
Cornelia van Helfteren
Inclusive Arts Practice MA
Art based action research project
Joe Scadding / Úna Haran / Jack Clearly / Sharon Fraser / Eva Jonas / Storm Young / Kizzie Fitzwilliams / Maisie Lou Dyvig / Phoebe Elliot Mills / Rebecca Shears / Jacob Clayton / Wanjun Yao / Fiona Smallshaw / Lila Chemin / Nikki Compson
Manifesto
- UNITE Everyone is welcome
- LISTEN Decisions are made collectively
- PLAY Learn through doing
- SUPPORT Against the competitive environment of the capitalist world
- HESITATE Process is more important than the end result
- SHARE Learn from each other and share our knowledge
- TOUCH Help to maintain value of the physical things in a virtual society
- MAKE Propagate new forms of knowledge production
- THINK Environmentally minded in materials and tread lightly in location
“The enjoyment of nature, like the enjoyment of art, music or literature, is a creative act. It is not a matter of passive exposure but of active involvement; with wild nature, as with man’s [sic] art, we see only what interests us, what means something to us.
The world of nature is beautiful or ugly, fascinating or dull, thrilling or frightening, according to the mental lens through which we view it. The quality of our experience depends in large measure on the powers of interpretation.”
Paul Brooks, from the National Audubon Society’s Manual of Outdoor Interpretation, 1968
INTRO
Three weeks, six walks, four locations, fifteen participants.
A collaborative experiment into inclusive, self-organised, radical learning. Challenging pedagogic monoculture and hierarchy through propagating new forms of knowledge production and cross curricular relationships.
People with disabilities, the young, people from ethnic minorities, people from inner cities and young adults are less likely to access the countryside and green spaces for activities and enjoyment. The Countryside agency released a diversity review where they stated that “While all countryside activities have the potential to be inclusive, many people currently experience real or perceived barriers to access” (2003).
Facilitated by Cornelia van Helfteren in the crisp winter month of January 2018, a group of young adults walked the Sussex coast, its woodlands and its open plains. Walkers stretched over a wide range of disciplines from sound arts, photography, cookery, English literature to architecture. Journal in hand, walkers met for six walks in four locations to collaborate and explored new terrains of gleaned knowledge that grew from interaction with each other and experimented with their own practices in unfamiliar outdoor locations.
These walks have trodden the paths for future groups to come together and learn from each other, play and make in facilitated outdoor locations. Seeds of new inclusive knowledge, sharing and creative collaboration; whilst directly addressing underrepresentation of socially excluded groups within countryside locations and green spaces.
What is inclusive arts?
Inclusive arts practice is a dynamic, radical and socially engaged practice that facilitates new conversations and approaches to education and societal structures through arts-based dialogue and collaboration.
Research Enquiry
The research enquiry considered the following areas of exploration:
- How to create a platform for under-represented groups to explore and form relationships with outdoor locations
- How to create safe spaces for sharing knowledge skills and experience where everyone feels comfortable
- How to explore how changeable moving locations work for art-based workshops
- How to hold spaces in flat structures with the aim of non-hierarchy relationships
- How to learn by doing and learn from each other
- How to prototype new collaborative peer to peer learning opportunities amongst students across universities
- How to provide opportunities for discovery, sharing and companionship amongst participants
- How to explore new terrains of free play within the structure of intersubjective experimentation, characteristic of modern art.
Methodology
The walks were held within the ethos of popular education, as a practice or (praxis) of freedom – an approach to education where participants engage with each other and the educator/facilitator as co-learners to critically reflect on issues within their communities building social capital and leading us to act in ways that make for justice and human flourishing.
The walks created spaces where people could articulate their own understanding their own world view, naming their world. Participatory and collaborative flat structure relationships, participants were seen as co-researchers. Working as a fellow explorer, one who did not have all the answers but facilitated a space for conversation and thought, I (as facilitator) worked with, not for participants. Creating a dialogue through which people educated each other through the mediation of the world. As a result of being involved, the participants developed a new a new awareness of their own self and their own worth; creating genuine dialogical ways of working as practitioners through communication of our own named worlds.
Participants/walkers were encouraged to actively share their recordings and thoughts with each other, choosing the routes and pointing out anything they found particularly interesting and wanted to explore further. We spent time journaling and responding to elements of each site. Creating content from their personal reflections, anecdotes, experiences and interpretations and in the process naming our worlds through our own personal interpretations.
Reflection
The walks have opened up new locations for learning in spaces that are often dismissed as ’non pedagogic’. Showing that the pedagogy can be far more then lectures, formal meetings, digital and book-based learning. The workshops focused on the whole experience rather than end-goals allowing the participants to relax and work at their own pace, learning about themselves and from each other. This change in approach can then encourage young adults to forge critical alliances in alternative communicative collaborative relationships that can translate more specifically within their disciplines and personal approaches to work and learning.
Holding popular education approaches I transcribed this into my actions as facilitators and artist.
- At the beginning of each workshop I asked everyone to stand in a circle and state their name, course of student and reason coming today.
- I introduced the activity, stating that I was also going to be journaling alongside them and we would be researching and learning together.
- Within the structure of the walks each individual had the opportunity to share and notate their own interpretations and experience allowing them to name their world. In the process of naming the world, we were giving agency to the individual. This structure for non-judgemental sharing and listening created a collective social dynamic. So moving from an object which is acted upon to a subject who knows and acts. Moving from a person who says, my story doesn’t matter my story is uninteresting, I have no story, to a person that says, actually my story connects to the history of this place, the history of this event, we are history my voice needs to be heard.
- I supplied all materials free of charge
- The walks were slow paced over long time-frames. They were deliberately un-strenuous to prioritise time for thought and to pause over physical exertion of miles covered.
- Emails were sent out with clear descriptions of how to travel to and from locations with exact timings of public transport, bike lock ups and parking space.
- To each walk I took with me spare waterproofs, sun cream and water to be prepared for adverse unpredictable conditions.
Journals
Each participant was gifted a journal, a hand bound collection of pages significant to a multitude of disciplines. Covers made from unused files taken from The University of Brighton admin office, pages consisting of old text books and unwanted off-cuts. Squared paper from mathematical books, lined paper from written based subjects, dotted paper from scientific textbooks, notation paper from musical books, thick watercolour paper from artistic books and all bound with hand-waxed off-cuts.
To each walk I brought with me a tin box painted with acorns filled with materials for mark making; willow charcoal sticks, sponge from Brighton beach, watercolours, graphite pencils and a variety of fine nib pens. The various materials were introduced slowly as the walks went on as to not seem intimidating to the participants from non-artistic disciplines.
“They could go in your pocket; you could hold them in one hand. You could hold them with big thick gloves on. They were just the right amount of useful.”
Participant feedback
Impacts noted by researcher and feedback from participants:
15 strangers met, 4 locations were explored, 15 journals were filled and thoughts were shared.
The following were noted by the researcher and/or the participants:
- Increased wellbeing of participants whilst on walks during their busy exam period
- Surprise at how comfortable they felt making and sharing with each other
- New tools were created in anticipation of moving elements of outdoor environments subject to restricted daylight hours, participants have gone on to use these in own practice
- New sensory landscape recording techniques were developed
- Participants noted that engaging with the locations creatively helped them to feel rooted in Brighton
- Interest shown for facilitated walks held in the future
- Participants enjoyed the opportunity to create together with other makers, writers and thinkers
- Alliances were formed amongst participants who exchanged contact details in order to further share work and ideas
“When I came on the walks I’d only been living here for three or four months. You helped me to feel routed here. Engaging with places and people creatively helped me to feel like I’m really here! When I’ve been back to the places since I’ve felt a sense of recognition that is different way of looking.”
– participant feedback
