Embodied dialogues. A transformative pedagogy of space, time, and identity

This methodological chapter focuses on the transformative potential of the sensobiographic walks, connecting this method to the tradition of embodied narrative and interpretative methodologies in research on adult education and learning. The method entails walking-with and remembering, hence creating a powerful, layered, material and symbolic setting that triggers an experience of storytelling, listening, and learning, or creation of the new. More specifically, the authors compare data from two projects: the SENSOTRA project on which the book is focused, and an Italian study (“Unexpected subjects: reception, space and meaning in asylum seekers’ experience”) using the same method to highlight the experience of newcomers and natives living in the same territory. In both cases, walking-with created unexpected contacts and shared experiences between the participants (and with the researcher, who is not, in this kind of study, a neutral presence). This enhanced the pedagogical dimension of the method. This analysis brought to problematize concepts of difference and identity based on categorization. From a fixed idea of difference implemented in the research design (“the newcomer” and “the native”, “the elderly” and “the youth”), a concept of difference as a feature of the relationship emerged from the interpretative analysis of the walks, to celebrate the value of human dialogue and dynamic contact, that produces curiosity, playfulness, transformation, and transcendence of individual qualities.