Walking Exercise
In short: Mental maps are a visual representation of how people perceive their daily environment and how people orient themselves in it. The walking exercise makes use of this strategy to initially build sustainability competencies in higher education settings.
Contents
Background
The world and environment are in a critical state as there are certain sustainability challenges, such as biodiversity loss, global warming, limited resources, and increased inequalities. From this, the need to react to them arises, both locally and globally. Developing certain sustainability competencies (skills, abilities) can be a start to learn how to do so. Wiek et al. (2011) have sketched out five competencies that should be considered for academic program development. These are as follows: systems thinking, anticipatory competence, normative competence, strategic competence, and interpersonal/collaborative competence. Based on these, Caniglia et al. (2015) have worked out a method, aiming at building some of the aforementioned competencies, which is called Walking exercise. The method combines mental mapping and exploratory walking.
Mental mapping stems from the field of behavioural geography and was especially coined by Kevin Lynch and his work “The Image of the City”. It captures how people perceive their urban environment. Practically speaking, a person’s image of a city is their mental map of it. The map usually entails the following characteristics:
(1) paths: routes along which people move throughout the city; (2) edges: boundaries and breaks in continuity; (3) districts: areas characterized by common characteristics; (4) nodes: strategic focus points for orientation like squares and junctions; (5) landmarks: external points of orientation, usually an easily identifyable physical object in the urban landscape.
Exploratory walking (or transect walking) is a method from the field of city planning often used for observation-based community improvement. Its aim is the gathering of data and experience of one’s own daily environment in a systematic way that transform one’s own perception of it, thereby gaining deeper understanding. This means walking through the environment along a defined path across an area and taking notes on what stands out. Often, it is done in small groups in order to be able to exchange with others.
What the method does
The walking exercise is a bottom-up, student-centered, and experience-based method in higher education settings to develop sustainability competencies in local contexts. It is meant for students with no or little previous knowledge in sustainability science, for example first-semester students in the environmental sciences realm and spans over one semester. The goal is to actively engage with sustainability problems in one’s surroundings from the beginning on and thereby understand concepts, principles, methods of sustainability and think about solution options.
Essential for this is the development of sustainability competencies, especially systems thinking, normative, and collaborative competencies as named by Wiek et al. (2011).
Systems thinking means the ability to analyze complex systems and problems across different domains (society, economy, environment) and scales (local to global) in order to engage with and tackle them. Normative compentencies, or “value-focused thinking”, stands for the evaluation of sustainability through different sustainability principles and the ability to discuss and apply values, habits, perception and experience. It is tightly connected with ethics and touches upon reflecting on one’s own position as well. Being able to motivate people and facilitate group processes using non-violent and empathetic communications, as well as actively listening, is the essence of collaborative competencies. As it describes practices between people, it is called interpersonal competence also.
In order to foster these competencies, students shall perceive and explore their urban environment using mental mapping activities and walking activities (connecting the learning objectives directly with one’s own experience). To do so, both phases (mapping and walking) are performed after one another and share the same four sub-steps: preparation, data gathering and analysis, interpretation and reflection, and lastly, sharing.
In their learning experience, students are supported by an instructor who guides them by preparing methodological/theoretical inputs, reflection questions, and facilitates in-class discussions. However, it is by no means a frontal teaching style but rather a source of support if needed, as students should learn from their own experience.
The table below displays an ideal-typical process of the Walking exercise.
| phase | stept | description | output |
|---|---|---|---|
| mental mapping: perceiving sustainability | preparation | After the class instructor has given a short input on theoretical and methodological foundations on how to visualize and map spaces, students develop a sketch of how they perceive their urban environment and what meaning or feeling certain places hold for them. They complement their sketches with a short questionnaire.
Students then compare similarites and differences between their sketches using Lynch’s elements (paths, edges, districts, nodes, landmarks) and discuss what might be reason for this. || individual sketch of map, short questionnaire |
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Strengths & Challenges
Strengths - There is little to no knowledge required beforehand, making it low-threshold and an easy entrance point into academic methods especially for people just starting their path in academia. - However, although it is quite a simple method, it helps identify core problems of sustainability in urban environments and visualizes underlying cause-effect structures. - Rather than learning passively in a classroom only, students actively engage within this framework, therefore directly tying learning objectives with experience. - Because of this, students have higher learning results meaning better acquisition of sustainability competencies. These are of importance for any sustainability related and solution-oriented work. - In a less structured way, mental mapping or explaratory walking can be applied in daily life as well, for instance when roaming around a prior unknown city.
Challenges - Since the method focuses on the visual sense for a way of orienting oneself, it neglects other factors and senses such as hearing or smelling. - Moreover, it only takes into account the currently observable situations and features, serving only as an entry point for a more in-depth analysis.
Normativity
- The Walking Exercise heavily builds on how people perceive their environment and what they consider important, which is individual and subjective to every person and their background, experiences, and biases. During the different steps within the framework and especially in collective decision processes, there can be potential for conflict because of these. - Moreover, by making one’s own perception explicit, engaging with it and exchanging with others about theirs, one’s own understandings and perception of surroundings may change in the process. - The method therefore holds potential for reflection on ethics/values as well, adding to its normative character.
Outlook
Caniglia et al. suggest that, although the learning framework has been developed in a special context, it could be used in different higher education settings (e.g. large introductory classes and campus initiatives), as well as in high-school educational programs and other program-based learning projects.
Concerning the effectiveness of the Walking Exercise they propose a summative assessment that evaluates to what extent the activities (mapping, walking, discussions, reflection) in the framework actually lead to the achievement of learning objectives, i.e. the initial development of systems thinking, normative and collaborative competencies
Key publications and References
(1) Caniglia et al. (2015): An experience-based learning framework - Activities for the initial development of sustainability competencies. (2) Lynch, K. (1960). The image of the city. MIT Press. (3) Wiek et al. (2011). Key competencies in sustainability: a reference framework for academic program development. (4) Gibson, R. B. (2006). Sustainability assessment: basic components of a practical approach.
