ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a four-month in-school research-creation project with 18 grade 9 English language arts students in a public school (state school). The chapter explores how walking as a pedagogical practice affects high school students’ expressive writing and concept creation. During the research-creation project, I met with the students twice a week for lessons in an outdoor ‘walking classroom:’ this classroom consisted of set of picnic tables beneath umbrellas and the surrounding environs we walked through. During the research-creation project, the students and I read poems, maps, and fiction by authors and theorists who conceptualized their work around walking and place, went on collective and solo walks, and experimented with the relationship between movement and ideation in different publics. This chapter is specifically embedded in discussions of public pedagogy and curriculum studies. After an introduction to the research-creation project, it focuses on a social justice inspired creative writing and ‘publishing’ project where students wrote poems and then posted them in public space. The poems discussed in this chapter consider the intersections of race-gender-power and interrogate the false binaries of private and public places of learning.
