Young Children as Wayfarers: Learning about Place by Moving Through It

This article describes the walking and moving of young children around places. It is based on an ethnographic study of children aged between 24 and 36 months visiting a museum. Drawing on Ingold's (2007) concept of wayfaring, the author argues movement through place creates embodied, tacit ways of knowing and experiencing the world. This embodied and tacit knowledge is not well-accounted for in dominant models of how young children learn. In this study, wayfaring both enabled the children to learn about places and routes, and led to the development of traditions, in which collective meanings and actions were attached to particular locations.