I have always been interested in looking at new ways of enhancing learning experience. For this, I often reflect on the ‘lightbulb moments’ of what triggered interest for me, but also the longer-term sustainable means by which I wanted to learn more about a given subject.
Is it possible to recreate this for students? Clearly different people learn in different ways and are inspired by different things, but I was interested to explore – drawing from a range of experiences and my own professional practice – how walking through and area might provide a different, perhaps enhanced learning experience and opportunity of the links between housing, environment and health.
Initially I created a paper map and set of instructions of places to look at, with a few probing questions. This in itself moved students outside of the classroom and into the real world, a new approach in itself, and many would go on to become practitioners. They seemed to relish the opportunity. I continued to take photographs of places of interest when conditions were good.
I later worked with curator and historian Zoe Hendon to develop this further and received ethical approval to ask students more formally how they found their experience, with a view to enhancing future tour(s) and to sharing these findings to new audiences. During this time, Zoe and myself had pooled our vast joint years of experience and knowledge into developing and refining the walking tour further and explored apps that might be suitable.
We initially created a housing history walking tour around the Hendon area. Whilst this was developed for students, it also provided a great learning opportunity for us too, as we experienced the excitement of identifying house histories (and possible futures) and delved into literature and archives to discover more, that we would possibly not have come across in other ways. We were also interested to understand if the actual process of walking through an environment, using a wide range of senses and feelings, made a difference to how people learned.
This first tour can be taken in real life or virtually by following this link:
Walking through Hendon’s Housing History | Tour Details — Geotourist
We then went on to consider how this housing and health histories walking tour could be appropriately adapted and replicated in the stunning setting of Greenwich. We started by scoping the area, walking and looking at various houses and flats that might be of interest. We spent many hours scouring resources. These included open access online sources as well as books, archives and the local conservation and listed buildings literature. This helped us find and walk to other parts of Greenwich, and during this process, we continued to see and investigate more.
We had initially planned to create just one walking tour of Greenwich that was not overly long and could be done in one go, but it emerged that there was far too much to see. We therefore started with East Greenwich and following great feedback, set about creating a further walking tour of West Greenwich. We were careful to think about balancing content and coverage, so there was no duplication, so that the two tours could be walked separately but could be combined if desired.
The links to these are available here:
East Greenwich Housing & Health Walking Tour | Tour Details — Geotourist
West Greenwich Housing and Health Walking Tour | Tour Details — Geotourist
Knowledge exchange outputs to date include these three app based tours, a conference/workshop presentation and a paper currently in press. We have also received excellent feedback, colleagues wish to replicate this idea at other universities and we have another workshop session and conference coming up.
More details will be posted here as and when available.