Bringing the Camino to the Classroom

Abstract

As a (delayed) 60^th birthday present to myself, I walked a two-week section of the Camino Portuges solo. At the end in Santiago de Compostela, I got my passport stamped, and the volunteer who checked my passport asked “How are you going to bring the Camino into the rest of your life.” Great question. I started thinking immediately about the classroom and ways to bring some of the transformative experiences – and the rich metaphor of journey as life – to my learners. While I haven’t yet been able to organize the dream (a course on literature of the journey that happens in Portugal and Spain on that amazing pilgrimage), I have found two more modest ways to bring the Camino to the classroom.

The first is in a research methods course that I have taught by contract grading for the past few years: I imported the idea of the Camino “Credential,” a passport (with stickers) that marks the various stops on the journey. And in a second class, I incorporated a trail walk-and-talk as a part of the class time experience. Both allowed us to incorporate something a little playful into our learning, and in the second, we were able to move beyond the classroom and to connect the student experience to the journey metaphor. In this session, after I outline my plan and experience of each innovation, participants will be asked to imagine ways to adapt the Camino experience to their own disciplines.