Making meanings of walking with/in nature: embodied encounters in environmental outdoor education

In outdoor education research, the agency of walking has received scant attention. Drawing from the author's PhD, this study examines the meaning of walking as embodied encounters with/in nature. Using an autophenomenographic approach, the elusive question of 'accessing' the 'felt' non-representational phenomena of walking with/in natureScapes is described. This study examined the nature of walking in different Australian ecologies. The 'meaning-making' affects, or ecosomaesthetics of walking incorporated sensory ethnographic methods and ecophenomenological efforts to represent walking with/in nature. Key research questions asked were: what are the embodied qualities of movement experiences, such as bushwalking, as afforded by the scapes in which we move?; how is embodied knowing afforded and encountered while walking with/in nature?; how and in what ways are environmentally ethical relationships constructed with/in and by nature whilst walking? These questions were addressed in three different case studies that provide empirical and conceptual 'layers' of describing, interpreting and explaining the embodied nature of walking. Findings inductively reveal how walking in/as time-space movement is afforded sensorially with/in nature. These soma (body) experiences and aesthetics of nature conceptualized as ecosomaesthetics, inform an ecopedagogy of walking. This study advances the literature in outdoor and environmental education research in three important ways (i) methodologically accessing the previous non-representational affects and meaning making of movement experiences in nature (ii) reveal numerous qualities and characteristics of bushwalking in three Australian scapes that, previously, have attracted little research and pedagogical insight (iii) offer an alternative to masculinist, commodified, instrumentalized 'core' walking practices dominant in outdoor education.