Teaching sensory geographies

Activity: Academic talk or presentation typesOral presentation

Description

This paper presented my undergraduate option course ‘Space, Place and Sensory Perception’ (SPSP). The course employs a variety of activities to cultivate students' sensory intelligence, including taste testing, smell experiments, and fieldtrips (e.g., visits to breweries and distilleries) to challenge students' preconceptions about people and places and explore how sensory experiences are shaped by social and cultural contexts. I emphasised the importance of play in encouraging the students to experiment, explore, and connect geographical and sensory theory to real-world scenarios. Incorporating smell, taste, and other senses into the curriculum, SPSP demonstrates the transformative potential of a sensorially engaged pedagogy and challenges the relative ‘sensorial poverty’ of traditional geography education.
Period18 Jun 2024
Held atSchool of Literatures, Languages and Cultures
Degree of RecognitionNational

Keywords

  • geography
  • senses
  • pedagogy
  • teaching
  • learning
  • assessment