As the semester comes to a close here, I’ll take a few moments to reflect on what happened with the Walking the Talk events and preview what is yet to come with this work.

The interdisciplinary faculty speaker series on walking and listening within our disciplines was better than I could have hoped. Every two weeks, throughout the semester, 100-150+ students, retirees, and community members came together to listen, learn, and ask questions. Following my initial presentation on walking as artistic practice, my colleagues in communications, English, biology, religion, and social work offered us rich and varied reflections from their own contexts. Seeing the intergenerational connections was such a gift and I know my students learned a great deal from witnessing how their elders continue to engage with learning.

In mid-April, Dr. Sheena Wilson arrived from the University of Alberta for 10 days on site with us at Bethel College. Sheena was by then a familiar face for my Slow Art for Fast Times students, having joined us virtually a few times to talk about walking and listening and to share some of her research on deep energy literacy and climate justice.

Slow Art for Fast Times students did some great work this semester, carrying out weekly walking practices, attending faculty speaker series presentations, engaging with ideas from the Slow movement, and contemplating some of the many different ways that it’s possible to listen. They then developed walks that connected with ideas we studied during the semester and planned out how to share them with a broader audience in experiential, ambulatory forms.

The culminating event of the semester, both for the students and for the speaker series, was a day-long interdisciplinary symposium, Walking the Talk: Listening Relationships in a Changing Climate. It was an amazing day of presentations and experiential activities. Sheena Wilson started us off with a morning keynote on “Relational Listening as Climate Action,” which set the tone for the day. Curator Joey Orr spoke about his work with artist Janine Antoni’s Here-ing participatory walking project, Ben Reed shared climate learnings from his decade of research walking and listening with turtles, and Aubrey Streit Krug and Amy June Breesman presented about their work at The Land Institute developing perennial grains, through the lens of care work and listening with the land.

Following lunch outdoors at some food trucks I’d brought to campus, we heard from Sydney Pursel and Dave Loewenstein about their community work to rematriate a sacred red rock from Lawrence to the Kaw Nation, and finally from Sheryl Wilson about listening in restorative justice work. Participatory sessions included a racial healing circle, listening walks led by students, and radio telemetry walks like Ben Reed uses for listening and tracking turtles. And finally, an ice cream finale! Much was shared, much was learned, and we are already in discussion about how to continue some of these conversations.

Just prior to the symposium, Sheena and I also learned that we were successful with a grant application to the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Our project, Walking the Talk: Climate Moves, will capitalize on the work we’ve just done this spring and continue it in Edmonton, using walking as a method of embodied learning on the land as a first step toward climate action. Our population groups will include City of Edmonton employees, University of Alberta students, and the Francophone community. Walks, lunch-and-learn sessions, and an October symposium will mirror to some extent the activities in Kansas. We’ll then gather our two communities virtually to share our locally specific learnings as we continue the work. I’m thrilled that SSHRC saw our research as deserving of funding!

I’m also excited that our work is generating some momentum: I just learned last week that next year’s First-Year Seminar common read at Bethel College will be Walking to Listen, a book of essays by a college grad who walked across the country to have conversations and learn from people of all walks of life. I truly believe that these concepts of walking and listening are not only accessible and contagious but also imperative practices for our current moment.