The Pilgrimage Project: Speculative design for engaged interdisciplinary education

This article presents the Pilgrimage Model as a template for educators wishing to lead students on site-specific studies of engaged learning. During the 2015–2016 academic year, a group of Georgetown University students, faculty, and staff pursued the Pilgrimage Project, a year-long pedagogical experiment in interdisciplinary education and speculative design. Students researched Georgetown’s historic Old North building from a variety of disciplinary angles and presented the results of their collective research in an on-site multimedia exhibit. The article analyzes the Pilgrimage Project from a practical perspective, as an effective means of delivering robust educational experiences, and from a theoretical perspective, as an example of speculative method in education research. As a model of interdisciplinary education, the Pilgrimage Model effectively merges disciplinary-specific course goals, in-depth student-led research, and student skill development in digital design and multimedia production.

本文将“朝圣模式”作为一种模板呈现给希望引导学生进行特定场所参与式学习研究的教育工作者。在2015 - 2016学年，乔治敦大学的一群学生、教师和工作人员开展了“朝圣项目”，这是一项为期一年的跨学科教育和推测性设计的教学实验。学生们从多种学科角度对乔治敦大学历史悠久的老北楼进行了研究，并在一个现场多媒体展览中展示了他们集体研究的成果。本文从实践角度分析了“朝圣项目”，将其视为提供丰富教育体验的一种有效手段，同时从理论角度将其作为教育研究中推测性方法的一个实例。作为跨学科教育的一种模式，“朝圣模式”有效地融合了特定学科的课程目标、深入的学生主导的研究以及学生在数字设计和多媒体制作方面的技能发展。