Learning Cities Multimodal Explorations and Placed Pedagogies

This book is an interdisciplinary text exploring the learning and educative potentials of cities and their spaces, including urban and suburban contexts, at all stages of life. Drawing on the insights of researchers from diverse fields, such as education, architecture, history, visual sociology, applied linguistics and sensory studies, this collection of papers develops and demonstrates the connection between experience, in all its dimensions, and informal learning in the city. The chapters discuss various sensory domains of experience, considering visual, embodied, and even sexual dimensions in relation to what and how learning operates, and the contributors reflect on their learning and inquiring experiences in the city, with special reference to topics such as narrativity, ‘race’ and ethnicity, equity, urban literacy, re-generation, participation, representation and oral histories.

1 Learning cities: Introduction.- Part 1 Multimodal explorations of the city.- 2 Researching and photographing cities: Getting started.- 3 Coming to our sense: Multiculturalism, urban sociology, and 'the other' senses.- 4 English literacies in Medellín: The city as literacy.- 5 Who is a city for? Reflections on children's narrative and design-led explorations.- 6 Signs of the city - Metropolis Speaking: Art-inspired youth and diversity in four European cities.- 7 Walking through spiritual neighbourhoods: A photo essay.- Part 2 Urban Pedagogies.- 8 Urban pedagogy and the need to develop city skills.- 9 Commercial ethnography: What are education researchers doing in the mall?.- 10 Learning around iconic buildings: Maps of experience in the making.- 11 Spaces of informal learning and cultures of translation and marginality in London's Jewish East End.- 12 Learning the sexual city.- 13 Learning in/from 'disadvantaged' communities: Connecting people and sites of learning.- 14 Learning how to smell a rat and identify the spaces: Community-based education and urban renewal.- 15 Afterword.

Sue Nichols is an educational researcher whose work crosses diverse contexts of formal and informal education. Using ethnographic, ecological and semiotic approaches she is particularly interested in how knowledge and practice is mobilised and circulates between contexts. Sue has edited and authored several books including Languages and Literacies as Mobile and Placed Resources (Routledge, 2017). She is currently Associate Professor of Education at the University of South Australia.