Each semester, I aim for lots of variation when selecting my four main classes. As a biology major and a chemistry and environmental studies minor, I have taken a biology and chemistry course in each of my first four semesters at Swarthmore, but I try to complement these with 2 humanities or social science classes. Swarthmore offers so many really unique course offerings; when I browse through the course catalog, I’m always surprised by how niche some of the possibilities are! I’ve gotten to take a wide range of really interesting classes—Environmental Justice in Latin America, Early Western Art History, History of the Holocaust, and more—but the award for the most unique and unexpected definitely goes to a class I took last semester called “Walking as a Way of Knowing.” It caught my eye because I love taking walks around campus and I was excited by the intersectionality in the course description. Walking… meets poetry… meets foraging… meets philosophy… meets urban infrastructure… meets history… meets social justice… I could go on and on. Sure enough, the course lived up to this description – we covered so much intellectual and geographic terrain over the course of the semester!
The class met once a week for 3 hours and our professor tried to incorporate a walking activity into each session, in addition to our discussion about the articles we had read for the week. The most memorable part of the class for me was the field trips we took together! During our nature unit, we took a botany-and ecology-focused hike around Ridley Creek State Park. During our unit about cities, we took a trip into Philly and explored different methods of navigation/wandering. My favorite was our trip to Chanticleer Gardens after our week learning about mindfulness and the history of garden walks.
I had a great time wandering through the 16 different gardens on the Chanticleer estate; we took the trip towards the end of the semester, so it was a wonderful opportunity to reflect on everything we had discussed in the course thus far. Our professor asked us to find a place to sit and to write a journal entry describing our surroundings and diving into a concept that we had been thinking about as we walked through the gardens. I’m not usually a big journaler, but I remember really enjoying the experience; I sat under a big oak tree and reflected on its permanence and “memory”… it has had children climbing its branches for centuries and has seen colonial ladies mincing along the path beneath their long skirts and parasols at a time when walking through their gardens was one of the few freedoms they were allowed. I’ll spare you the details of the rest of my musings, but the bottom line is that it was a really impactful experience. I was reminded that there is so much value in doing academic thinking outside of a traditional academic setting. In this course, one theme we talked a lot about was how the physical space we are in can affect the trajectory of our thoughts and conversations, and I think that this trip to Chanticleer was a perfect example of that. I am really grateful that several of my classes at Swarthmore have given me the opportunity to do off-campus learning and thinking like this to parallel the traditional “ways of knowing” we experience within classroom walls.
