Touching Landscape: Intersections of Embodied and Ecological Pedagogy

This paper takes an experimental teaching session that involved a silent excursion into the UK’s Peak District as a starting point to consider the relationship between embodied and ecological pedagogies. Human society today faces an undeniable ecological crisis owing to overexploitation of natural resources. While environmental science and activism offer important aspects of the solution to this crisis, this paper asks whether pedagogies of embodied practice may also have a valuable role to play. Following a brief introduction to the historical role of natural ecology in some lineages of performance training (e.g., Grotowski, Gardzienice, Halprin, Tanaka), the paper cites student testimonies from the experimental teaching session in order to investigate how non-instrumental practices of this kind could make a meaningful pedagogical contribution to the development of ecological consciousness in the twenty-first century.