Learning by feeling: excursions into the affective landscape

Abstract

Learning by doing has become a common phrase in the scholarship of teaching and learning as research continues to emphasize the benefits of active student engagement in higher education. Instead of passive vessels to be filled with information, students become the architects of their own education. While traditional ways of teaching focus on what students should learn, there is now more interest in how they should learn. With the emotional turn in geography, research has increasingly focused on the lived experience and the emotional and affective dimensions of space and place. However, the question often remains as to how to bring such research into an active learning environment that extends beyond the classroom. Instead of learning by doing, learning by feeling is presented as a new way of teaching emotional geographies. Student projects from two courses in landscape geography reveal how excursions into the affective landscape help students explore emotional geographies through more creative, reflective, affective, and active learning assessment strategies.