Teaching sensory geographies in practice: transforming students’ awareness and understanding through playful experimentation

Various ‘turns’ within human geography (‘emotional’, ‘sensory’, ‘experimental’, and ‘creative’) have highlighted the role that the senses play in our embodied and emotional experiences of place, and the need for more sensuous scholarly practices. Resulting work has enriched the discipline theoretically and methodologically, however, the same cannot be said for our pedagogy. Drawing on data relating to one undergraduate Honours option course, this paper highlights the powerful role that sensorially engaged pedagogy can play in transforming the awareness and understanding of geography students. It focuses, in particular, on methods of emphasising the embodied, emplaced and individually constructed nature of knowledge, the critical potential of play in the learning process, and how students might be emboldened to enact performances of understanding leading to a transformation in the person of the student.