The Winterage Festival in a Learning Landscape

ORCID

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9980-4946

Document Type

Book Part

Disciplines

Bilingual, Multilingual, and Multicultural Education | Education | Other Education | Outdoor Education

Publication Details

Book Chapter titled: The Winterage Festival in a Learning Landscape, featured in Rossetti, G., Wyatt, B., & Ali-Knight, J. (Eds.). (2023). Festivals and Edutainment (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003305415

Abstract

This chapter examines a niche festival called The Winterage Festival in the west of Ireland that has education, place-based learning, entertainment, experiences, heritage, folklore, sustainability, and biodiversity engrained in its DNA. This study is novel in that it examines edutainment in the context of a small festival in a “learning landscape” to explore if entertainment and/or education happen concurrently. To examine how this festival fits within the concepts of edutainment, interviews were held with key stakeholders, service providers, and visitors, along with three visitor experiential journeys to ensure full immersion in the festival experience. The findings suggest that education and entertainment coincide in this lunar landscape, where reverse transhumance, moving cattle to upland pastures (called “winterages”) over the winter months, before returning to fertile lowland pastures for the summer is practised. Visitors and locals alike are fully immersed in this festival, where co-creation leads to the learning landscape providing the canvas for an outdoor classroom experience. Participants vary in terms of their awareness of learning and note that, surrounded by nature, learning is happening in tandem with the natural rhythm of life, farming, and the survival of The Burren landscape – a true edutainment experience

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