Haley, D. (2021) ‘A Walk on the Wild Side: Steps towards an ecological arts pedagogy’, International Journal of Education Through Art, 17(1), pp. 135–152. doi:10.1386/eta_00054_1.


David Haley develops walking as an ecological arts pedagogy through a fourteen-year programme of more than twenty walking performances across nine cities in five countries. Its iconic idea is that urban walking can become a form of question-based learning capable of revealing ecological interdependence that remains invisible to conventional disciplinary observation. The project emerged from noticing an apparently minor urban event—a tree growing high on a Victorian building—and allowing curiosity to expand into a sustained programme of inquiry. Haley’s theoretical contribution is therefore ecological and pedagogical at once: the walk produces a temporary learning system in which participants encounter urban life as a field of relations rather than as a backdrop. Methodologically, he combines performance, dialogue, community participation, observation and open-ended questioning without resolving them into a single scientific protocol. The bridge to transdisciplinary research is exact: ecological knowledge is generated through attention, conversation and situated movement, making pedagogy an urban practice of collective perception and future-making.