#880: Walking Urban Green Spaces: Secondary Students’ Descriptions of Returning to Embodied Relations with Nature

While interactions in nature and urban green spaces have been studied for their benefits to developing, wellbeing, and quality of life, this paper draws on research with secondary students engaged in a walking curriculum to examine how they describe what they are learning through walking, as well as their relations with nature. We utilized central concepts from cultural-historical approaches to the learning sciences—including learning on the move and learning as movement—along with literature from critical geographies to focus our analysis on surfacing embodied relations with nature. We address three themes in this paper: walking as a return to the senses, walking as a return to the body, and walking as a return to relationality. Walking led to learning that was embodied, organic, and emotional, linking curriculum, students’ lived experiences and their values, with real and imagined embodied and emplaced social futures.