Seasonal walks

Background

Understanding seasons and seasonality is, to a large degree, linked to individuals and groups' skill at perceiving or apprehending the temporal rhythms in an environment. This skill is associated with "habits of noticing" seasonal cycles; from animal lifecycles to phenology, hydrology, weather, or patterns of social activity.

Habits of noticing are shaped by how we engage with an environment – our activities– so that a gardener has a differently honed habit to an office worker, and there are many who feel that large sections of modern society are losing their ability to sense or read the seasons.

Some groups are working hard to cultivate a general awareness of their environment – a practice often associated with "mindfulness" movements and other ways of re-connecting with the natural environment, often appealing to all senses (Lefebvre noted that the instrument for apprehending temporalities is with the human body and senses).

One approach is to organise walks to notice an environment, as a long pedagogical tradition, often deployed in schools, for example. The CALENDARS project joined school students (in the 12 year old age group and 16 year old age group) on walks in New Zealand and Norway, sometimes just observing how teachers ran these walks, and other times augmenting this practice with some purposeful guidance on how to notice seasonality.

Objectives

• To cultivate a group’s habits of noticing seasonal rhythms in an environment
• To stimulate personal reflection – a reflexive habit of noticing – on how individuals think, feel and act seasonally, and what seasons mean for them.
• To develop a sense of the seasonal rhythms particular to a place.

See downloadable instructions in both English and Norwegian below.