Shifting shores: Transformative learning with the city

Abstract

Highlights:

– Post-human methodologies support geographical experimentation in social science education

– Walking with a virtual (Deleuze) landscape manifests the materiality of the city

– Diverse temporal and spatial rhythms reveal the subject as porous

– Encounters with the city create space to think and do things differently

– Post-human approaches to transformative learning challenge detached subjectivities

Purpose: Our research unpacks transformative learning through learning-with the city and the agency of encounters. We exemplify how post-human education methodologies can make students sensitive to rhythms beyond their own, helping them to get to know Earth as more than a backdrop for human activity.

Approach: Walking the historical shoreline of Helsinki challenges rigid notions of a landscape and collapses the past with the present and future, revealing the porousness of the city and self.

Findings: Engagement with landscape remnants makes everyday transformations and entanglements tangible, engendering thinking-with the city.

Research implications: Post-human approaches to transformative learning give valuable insights into how learning is non-linear, non-representational, and takes place through meaningful encounters with the world

Practical implications: Post-human methodologies lay the groundwork for how experiments could be developed by social science educators in different localities, e.g., having students walk along a railway refusing to give way for an ever-growing city.