Place-based approaches to regenerative education: using walking guides to reveal the story of a place

Can situating case studies in the place where they happened change the learning experience of students? That is the question this project will attempt to answer. The project will have two phases.

Phase 1 will create two podcasts, which are designed to be listened to as students walk the journey of materials experiencing for themselves the supply chain and the approach of place-based design. The two case studies will be:

1. Hayesfield – where students will start at the bale house, then walk to Southstoke, where a flying factory was created and the straw was harvested, before walking down to the Nucleus at Hayesfield, the site of the project.
2. Lee Sixthform Centre – where students will explore the local geology before hearing about the attempts made to include different waste materials from the construction in the final project, not everything made it, but there is a rammed earth wall.

Both projects will include interviews with researchers, engineers, clients and those involved in the delivery of the project.

The idea is that these are not so much “podcasts” but walking tours, as you might get at the Roman Baths, situating you in the place of the design, opening up imagination and the importance of place in the decisions that were made.

Phase 2 will use a simple quasi-experimental design to assess the impact of the walk on student learning. First, a suitable instrument (e.g., knowledge tests, questionnaires, interviews) will be selected or adapted from the educational assessment literature to measure learning outcomes. Then, participants will be divided into three groups: one reading the case study (no audio, no walk), one listening to the podcast while remaining stationary (audio only), and one walking the route while listening to the podcast (audio + walk). Then, comparisons across the groups will show whether adding the walk improves learning compared to listening alone or reading the material statically.