Learning Cities

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-ix

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2. Introducing Learning Cities

   • Sue Nichols

   Pages 1-6

3. Multimodal Explorations of the City

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 7-7

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   2. Researching and Photographing Cities: Getting Started

      • Caroline Knowles

      Pages 9-21

   3. Coming to Our Senses: Multiculturalism, Urban Sociology and ‘the Other’ Senses

      • Alex Rhys-Taylor

      Pages 23-36

   4. English Literacies in Medellín: The City as Literacy

      • Raúl Alberto Mora, Carla Pulgarín, Natalia Ramírez, María Camila Mejía-Vélez

      Pages 37-60

   5. Who Is a City for? Reflections on Children’s Narrative- and Design-Led Explorations

      • Angelique Edmonds

      Pages 61-76

   6. Signs of the City: Metropolis Speaking

      • Stefan Horn

      Pages 77-94

   7. Walking Through Spiritual Neighbourhoods: A Photo Essay

      • Terence Heng

      Pages 95-107

4. Urban Pedagogies

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 109-109

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   2. Urban Pedagogy and the Need to Develop City Skills

      • Stephen Dobson

      Pages 111-129

   3. Commercial Ethnography: What Are Education Researchers Doing in the Mall?

      • Sue Nichols

      Pages 131-146

   4. Learning Around Iconic Buildings: Maps of Experience in the Making

      • Gabriele Budach

      Pages 147-168

   5. Spaces of Informal Learning and Cultures of Translation and Marginality in London’s Jewish East End

      • Ben Gidley

      Pages 169-182

   6. Learning the Sexual City

      • Alison Rooke

      Pages 183-201

   7. Learning in/from ‘Disadvantaged’ Communities: Connecting People and Sites of Learning

      • Denise MacGregor

      Pages 203-217

   8. Learning How to Smell a Rat and Identify the Spaces: Community-Based Education and Urban Renewal

      • Marjorie Mayo

      Pages 219-234

   9. Afterword: Reading the Book Through the Lens of ‘Bildung’

      • Stephen Dobson

      Pages 235-239

5. Back Matter

   Pages 241-246

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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.

• City Interventions
• Critical pedagogy
• Geo-semiotics
• Learning Environments
• Materiality
• Place-based education
• Spatiality
• Urban ethnography
• Urban pedagogy
• environments as contexts for learning
• learning and instruction

• School of Education, University of South Australia, Magill, Australia

  Sue Nichols, Stephen Dobson

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. 

Stephen Dobson is Professor and Dean of the School of Education, University of South Australia. Prior to entering higher education, he worked with refugees in community contexts for thirteen years. His interests include assessment, professional development, refugee studies, bildung, inclusion and classroom studies. He has recently published Assessing the Viva in Higher Education. Chasing Moments of Truth (Springer publishers, 2017).

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