A Walking Curriculum – teachers taking imagination outside

The 60 easy-to-use walking-focused activities in this resource are designed to engage students’ emotions and imaginations with their local natural and cultural communities, to broaden their awareness of the particularities of Place, and to evoke their sense of wonder in learning. For example, students may be asked to find different things (such as shapes, spaces or lines, evidence of growth or change, “the best” hiding places), to change perspectives (imagine being a beetle, a detective, or a visitor from outer space), to encounter the world differently (emphasizing one sense over another or moving through space differently), to seek evidence of human-nature relationships, to identify patterns, or to locate natural or human systems in action.

Since its publication the Walking Curriculum has been translated into French and Spanish. Judson also collaborated with Indigenous educator Heidi Wood to produce Walking Forward: Learning From Place, which applies an Indigenous lens to walking practices and shares the spiral-inquiries of 14 educators that employ imaginative and ecological pedagogies to teach learners about the First Peoples Principles of Learning.

The Walking Curriculum challenges teachers to re-imagine how they teach and it encourages teachers to personally re-connect to Place and community. The #getoutside message involves acknowledging that our communities—natural and cultural—are teachers, too. This Walking Curriculum breaks down concepts of “school” that keep students inside and inactive. As a further spur to taking teaching outside, CIRCE sponsors the annual 30-Day Walking Challenge.