Walking Pedagogy for Science Education and More-Than-Human Connection

This literary-visual métissage weaves together stories, scholarship and photographs. What can be unearthed—science education, embodied knowledge, environmental ethics—when we walk on the land? Embodied and sensorial engagement fosters relational and enlivening educational experiences. Whether preschool or post-doc, direct sense experience offers not only active and experiential pedagogy, but also a spiritual attunement with the natural world. Now, amid the climate crisis and screen fatigue pandemic, such Earth resonance is of utmost import. Let us walk through a snowy forest, ponder what counsel our shoeless feet (and David Abram) afford us, and envision the learning environment as an emergent and adaptable opportunity for connection and wonder.


Walking the Unexpected
The moment I hoped for almost didn't happen.
After weeks of preparation, from signing liability forms, arranging carpools and ensuring all 35 students arrive at the same place at the same time, we are snowed out. Or, at least, the first trail is ankle-deep in snow, still lingering from last week. The undergraduate students are dressed for a casual walk, not a snowshoeing expedition. Nevertheless, I proceed.
Unlike my science students, where biomes, interspecific interactions, biotic nomenclature and other quantifiables are the prescribed outcomes, this is the first gaggle of expressive arts students I brought to Tynehead Park in Surrey, British Columbia. We began with storytelling a nature encounter, as I often do with my biology students, and I then segued into opening the senses (Young et al., 2010). Students embodied their owl eyes, deer ears, raccoon hands and dog nose.
Dog nose? I can hear the academics decry. Sounds childish. How is it relevant to the curriculum? Especially for adult learners?
While naturalized outdoor environments are often encouraged for young learners, since they improve sensory and kinaesthetic awareness (Wilson, 2012), post-secondary institutions prioritize the abstract, analytical and rational, a priory carried over from the Enlightenment, which had "no use for notions of life, sentience, experience, subjectivity, corporeal embodiment and agency" (Weber, 2013, p. 15). My teaching is often visceral, sensorial and embodied. What do students learn from this? First, they learn that the mind is not the only realm where learning occurs. A conventional classroom has four walls, desks in rows, with an orator at the front. Fortunately, this has shifted in many schools, though less so in post-secondary, where lecture persists as the primary means of content delivery (Stains et al., 2018). A curriculum that singularly favours the mind also devalues, by its omission, bodily, emotional and spiritual ways of knowing. As Indigenous scholar and botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer (2012) explains, we want learners to "engage all of their human faculties of mind, body, emotion, and spirit which conventional science education practices tend to let atrophy" (pp. 320-321).
Second, learning with and through the body can be joyful, relational and deeply engaging.
Whether I'm in an arts classroom, a science lab, or (preferably) in an outdoor learning environment, I regularly have students move their bodies through the space. They line themselves up as samples on an electrophoresis gel, build a circulatory system with chairs and tables and walk through it as blood cells, tread through the carbon cycle, or notice how the grass bends under their bare feet. Such activities nearly always prove exciting and eventful, and reveal unexpected learnings (Beavington, 2016) that a Powerpoint-based lecture doesn't afford. Even when they don't go as planned, something is gained. When you role-play a carbon atom, moving from the atmosphere to leafy producers, to hungry consumers, to putrid decomposers, and eventually back to the atmosphere, you have built a bodily memory, a physical journey perhaps more likely to be remembered, cared about and referenced in the future. I can ask learners, "Remember when you were decomposed in 167 the carbon cycle?" Or, "What path did you take (literally) to return carbon dioxide to the atmospheric reservoir?" Third, being engaged with our physicality: even a short 20-minute walk can release endorphins (Park et al., 2010), heighten awareness of our animality (Abram, 2011), and attune us to our full suite of senses. The separation between us and the outer world, largely perceived rather than actualized, since we are always embedded biologically in the environment, starts to dissolve. In other words, we feel more alive and entangled with other life. Is such learning-engaging, enlivening, envelopingnot a recipe for transformative pedagogy? In being present with our bodies' sensuous side, more in rhythm with muscle, blood and bone, we are reminded that humans are one type of body (of many) that comprise our biosphere. I believe this is as relevant for the preschooler as it is for the post-doc.
As Kimmerer (2012) writes about leading field experiences: They come away knowing more plants, more processes, more chemistry, and more ecology than when they began and knowing it in a different way, through direct relationship of mind, body, emotion, and spirit-not because I have taught them, but because the land has. They walk humbly on the trails not as through a warehouse from which they take, but as through a home, from which they receive. This is the beginning of reciprocity. I do not think it is possible to engage in reciprocity without first experiencing the gifts of the land and then being drawn to return a gift in kind. (p. 321) On this note, let's return to snowy Tynehead Park. The 35 students have stretched their senses.
Having focused their eyes on a single spot, trained their ears to the nearest sound (often their own breathing) and the furthest (cars in the distance), noticed how their clothes and the breeze feel against their skin, smelled the cellulose (plucked grass) in their hands, and listened for the beating of their own hearts, they are ready for their next task. The invitation? To walk in silence, at a mindful pace, for the next few minutes, attuning our bodies to the coastal rainforest. Or as Kimmerer might say, to walk humbly.
Although I've walked this path dozens of times with students, never disappointed, the response today is exceptional. We gather on a wooden lookout platform. The voluminous bark of an old-growth grand fir-the biggest I've found in the park-and the rustling current of the river below asks us to stop here. A giant window has opened to reveal the temperate rainforest in its totality, which holds our collective silence. The natural environment has set the tone. How does it do this?
This is difficult to pinpoint. Yet we can surmise a few possibilities. The grand fir's sheer size, with a trunk circumference that would take five students to ring around, its branches heavy with snow, and its top towering out of sight, is quite possibly the largest tree any of these students have ever seen.
The lookout platform is also a natural place to stop, offering a view of this park's namesake, the Serpentine River. (I inform students at the start of the field trip that Tynehead refers to "Serpentine" and "headwaters", although the headwaters are actually located beneath the nearby Guildford Mall parking lot.) The river, its larger boulders iced with snow, wends through a small ravine, offering a view of hundreds of plant species that requires more than a quick glance to take in. Evergreen conifers, leafless maples, ferns and moss create a living, breathing mosaic.

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I am a guide here, and nature is the teacher (Jickling et al., 2018). In this case, the snow-which I had deemed an obstacle, or at least a deterrent-became the highlight experience.
I asked students what they noticed. They voiced their feelings and reflections with an excited reverence. By keeping silent, they could hear so much more. The crunch of the week-old snow felt loud as thunder. The icy path also meant that students took special care on how and where they placed their footsteps. They were intentional. The air felt cooler, fresher. They could see their breath.
They were curious about the snowberry drupes and if they were edible. There were tracks from nonhuman animals. The students' awe for this place and the rarity of snow, cultivated through purposeful sensory experience, was palpable.
Humphreys (2018) speaks of her own childhood school experience, where she gleefully watched the snowfall outside the classroom windows. A gift, as Kimmerer might say, from the clouds.
But the teacher stuck to her lesson plan. "When the bell rang we were let outside, but it had warmed up. The delicate dryness of the first snow had already disappeared" (Humphreys, 2018, p. 57). So, too, did a potential experience disappear, the result of a static curriculum, like following a routine script better served by improvisation. How much more engaging, curious, wonder-filled, connective, spontaneous, memorable and joyful would it have been for these learners to venture into the schoolyard for the first snowfall of the season? Later in life, at Maple Ridge Environmental School, Humphreys (2018) observed new snow as not a distraction but an affordance, a learning opportunity. The assignment that emerged from the moment of the fallen snow was to collect snowflakes to be examined under a microscope.
From here began lessons on temperature, on dimensions, on collecting, on difference, on patterns, on counting, and later the inspiration for snowflake art and sculpting. All of these lessons occurred while the children were outside walking. (pp. 57-58) Walking amongst the snowflakes of a gentle flurry, the emergent learning opportunities are myriad (see Table 1). Teachers are often expected to fragment and articulate learning that happens in schools. In reality, much like the senses, these disciplines, topics and activities easily shift and blend with one another. We don't instruct students to use only the sense of touch for an entire class period; similarly, when learning in an emergent way outdoors, we don't need to limit learning to a single focus.

Discipline
Topics Activities Or students could have simply enjoyed the miracle of first snow through bodily experience and built snowmen and slid down hills. There is a difference between taking an activity outside and learning with or through nature; the latter necessitates more intentionality on the part of the teacher, and it encourages the voice of nature to be heard. Plunking a desk in a field, and having students listen to a lecture is a distinct experience from active outdoor engagement where nature has agency and co-facilitates student learning through direct sensorial attunement. This can lead to notions of reciprocity, where students are not learning about nature, but are companions with the natural world.
Of course, many of the topics in Table 1 can be blended and co-studied. I break them down here for the purpose of showing the diversity of learning that can occur in company with a single weather type. After returning to class, other subjects, for older learners, take on significant relevance (see Table 2).

Discipline Topics Activities
Environmental Science  When delivering professional development workshops for K-12 teachers, I have noticed a reluctance to go outside. The number of variables to keep track of-temperature, terrain, safety, precipitation, snow-can be daunting. As Fleischner et al. (2017) explain, "Field courses also require extraordinary effort that is typically undertaken without adequate institutional support for out-ofclass faculty time invested in planning, pre-trip reconnaissance, logistic preparation, and fulfillment of the regulatory demands of training, liability, and permitting" (p. 561). Yet the potential rewards are limitless. This emergent learning requires flexibility and adaptability (Beavington, 2018). Like an amoeba, it shapeshifts based on what it encounters to allow learning to be guided not only from the learners, but also from the environment. When it snows, the script should change; better yet, scrap the script, and let the students tell the story.

Concerning Hobbits and David Abram
My three-year-old daughter throws off her shoes and declares: "I'm walking bare feet!" We venture into fern alley, soles crunching dried salal leaves and toes curling around fir cones. I watch her senses engage with the forest. The collective rustle of high alder leaves signals imminent weather. The viscosity of mud squishing between her toes, the shifting path the small creek takes when she dams it with dirt, the sweet pungency of stinging nettle-all provoke deeper awareness.  Abram (1996) is an ecophilosopher. A proponent of oral storytelling, of embodying who we are, especially in relation to the land, he is also a self-proclaimed madman. During this course in phenomenology, the study of first-person experience, he invited us to think with our skin. Since the senses co-create the world, and "perception is the glue that connects our nervous system to the surrounding ecology" (personal communication, July 10, 2017), we should see the body as a thinking being.
The instructions are simple. Take off your shoes and walk the paved path. David's next instruction: walk the bare earth.
This also feels solid, but in a different way. My foot, held by the grass and dirt, moulds itself to the surface. At the same time, the surface moulds itself to my foot. A rootedness accompanies each step. My toes hug twigs and cones, testing, sensing and reacting to their textual bodies. My skin feels the prick of unexpected thorns.
This feels like a simple exercise. Perhaps, much like walking a forest path in silence, the simplicity is what allows for something profound. The primacy of experience allows for holding our attention to touching the earth and to the earth touching us. While the pavement does not respond to my steps, the earth reciprocates like well-fitted orthotics, with texture, flex and counsel. Without sock or shoe to interfere, my sole can now discern soil and rock, sharp and smooth, wet and dry, warm and cool. If graduate students can do this, why not learners of any age?
Without shoes, you are more bodily aware, more mindful of each step, led more by your senses and less by habit. If the body is a thinking being, then every pore, hair, and sensory neuronsuch as the 200,000 nerve endings on the sole of each foot-can be made available for clarity of thought. To think with our feet is to think with the earth.

Walking Away from Screens and Convention
A seed is directly shaped by the available soil, sunlight and rainfall. Similarly, our familial and collegial relationships influence our character, whereas our relationship with nature determines the purview of our environmental ethic. If we walk solely on pavement, never sit still long enough to listen to the other-than-humans, and primarily experience the natural world through screens, our relation to nature may also be rendered artificial. Such limited and simulated encounters with the natural world do not imprint themselves as powerfully as an immersive trek through the animacy of the temperate or tropical rainforest, both of which I have observed indelibly leave their mark.
With the intensification of the "screen pandemic" (Helander et al., 2020;Jiang, 2020), and increased eye strain and numerous physical issues related to screen time, the regular curriculum needs to be re-assessed. What and how we taught pre-COVID-19 cannot simply be transferred to a screen-based device. Despite this screen fatigue, nearly everything at my university is now online: registration, meetings, office hours, lectures and exams. Yet one might argue that our students need less screen time, not more (Louv, 2005). For example, Kuo and Taylor (2009) found that children diagnosed with ADHD, after being led on a park walk for 20 minutes, displayed improved concentration comparable to the effects of using common ADHD medication. Given the coronavirus pandemic, how can screens be used to facilitate outdoor experiences?
Thoreau wrote, "I think I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least . . . sauntering" (Emerson & Thoreau, 1992, p. 74). Compare this to today's Canadian children, who average 8.2 sedentary hours a day (Humphreys, 2018), versus 20 minutes of outdoor play (Juster et al., 2004). We are in dire straits.
In preparation for the summer 2020 semester, my colleagues at KPU and I scrambled to design and implement remote teaching alternatives to typically in-person, experiential learning. The specific challenge I will speak to here is BIOL 2322 (Ecology), a second-year science course, whose lab component is field-trip based. How to replicate through a screen the experience of being in the forest, bog or river?
Thus, was born the Ecology in 1m 2 study. In collaboration with Amy Huestis and Carson Keever, we created an inquiry-based activity (or rather, experience) where students periodically visited the same one-square meter plot in their environment, continuously noting species interactions that they observed in their plots. Students learned how to accurately depict their environment, and science students were paired with fine arts students to cross-pollinate questions and ideas.
I noticed several elements in this activity in relation to walking. First, regardless whether a student's site was in their backyard, the park down the road, or the university campus, students needed to walk there. They had to get out of their house and embody this experience. Senses other than sight and sound were engaged. They smelled the freshly cut grass, turned over stems and leaves to search for invertebrates. The natural sciences are typically head-centric, neglecting the difficult-to-quantify scent and taste. Yet when "we insist on only what can be characterized quantitatively, we thereby forgo a lot of information" (Landman-Reiner, 2020, p. 2). Students indicated how peaceful and relaxing they found this exercise and noted how the world around them (usually environments they saw every day) opened up. They started to ask questions, curious about why they saw ants on the cherry tree, which species were invasive, and why the birds were calling. I believe the corporeal aspect of this experience, and having to move (i.e., walk) to their sites, helped facilitate this connection and curiosity. This was not only an intellectual journey, but a physical one as well.
Does how we walk matter? Most certainly. When we learn to walk with care and intention, we are "changing-softening-[our] presence in the world" (Young & Gardoqui, 2013, pp. 61-62). I have been extraordinarily privileged and blessed to travel to the remote Colombian Amazon Rainforest as an instructor for the Amazon Interdisciplinary Field School at KPU. Our guide, Elvis, invited us to wake early one morning for an optional wildlife walking expedition. One student and I showed up, wearing the standard gumboots required for the muddy paths. Partway through the walk, Elvis told the student that he needed to show her how to walk. Rather than clomping her foot down, she needed to plant each step with care, placing the ball of her foot first, and then rolling back onto her heel. In this way, she made less noise, and brought an intentionality to her gait. Goertz (2018) elucidates how walking promotes divergent (rather than convergent) thinking, and "is an excellent facilitator of original, innovative thinking because the physical act of left-right steps simulates the integration of the two halves of the brain, the logical and the intuitive" (p. 61).
Walking meetings are a great way to discuss walking curriculum (what we teach, content that we 175 emphasize) and pedagogy (teaching philosophy, how we teach). Perhaps walking can also allow us to "embrace and enact a pedagogy of place within landscapes of the natural surroundings, family and community, and the affective foundations of a life lived in a respectful reciprocal relationship with the world" (Kelly, 2012, p. 364).
I still fall into the trap of equating walking to time wasted. My co-presenter, Dave Chang, and I prepped for a presentation at the University of British Columbia, on the topic of Aldo Leopold and the GPS ecocache (Beavington & Jewell, 2018). Leopold was a conservationist and proponent of learning on the land, while the GPS ecocache is an activity where students navigate to specific ecological sites and learn something at each location. Dave and I shot ideas back and forth for our presentation. We wanted to take participants outside and make our way to a coveted site (the same chosen by David Abram) next to the Nitobe Memorial Garden near the outskirts of campus. I lamented: "We'll lose so much time by walking there. If only we had a teleporter!" In pondering places to visit along the way-the ponderosa pine outside Carl Leggo's office, the nurse stump along Lower Mall Road-it struck me. Rather than diversions, these could very well be the highlights. The anchors of our interactive talk. My mind eventually shifted to the idea that the walk itself could be the presentation.
The same goes for teaching. A path, field, yard or road can all be mobile classrooms. Walking as pedagogy is not a new phenomenon. Thoreau opened a school that included regular nature walks as part of the curriculum. Yet, in our modern insular lives, we need to get past our own preconceptions of where and how learning happens.

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I recently taught an introductory biology course. The course outline prescribed three midterms and 10 quizzes. I had taken students on a field trip (a first for this long-offered course) earlier in the semester. It had gone so well, I wanted to do a second. But students had a quiz to write, and a midterm to review. I still vividly remember the epiphany of getting past my conventional thinking: they can do these outside. We went to a local park, where the cherry blossoms were in full bloom, rather fitting for the day's topic: the nervous (or sensory) system. We began with the requisite quiz, outdoors, perhaps a first for all of us, and certainly incongruent with the remainder of this experience. Then the students connected what they were directly experiencing-hearing a crow caw, smelling a nascent bloom, watching the clouds roil overhead-with what they had learned about their own brain and nervous systems. Nothing else from this semester came close to being as engaging, curious, wonder-filled, connective, spontaneous, memorable and joyful.
And it almost didn't happen.

About the Author
Lee Beavington is a river walker, forest seeker and island dweller. He is a TEDx speaker, awardwinning author, learning strategist and interdisciplinary instructor at Kwantlen Polytechnic University and Simon Fraser University. He also served as co-curator for the Wild Things: The Power of Nature in Our Lives exhibition at the Museum of Vancouver, recipient of the Award of Merit for Excellence in Exhibitions. His interdisciplinary research explores environmental ethics, place-based learning and contemplative science education. More about Lee at www.leebeavington.com.