Walking the Camino de Santiago: A Journey Through Sound, Place, and Encounter

Faculty Leaders: Dr. Patrick Schmidt, Professor of Music and Music Education, and Dr. Cathy Benedict, Assistant Professor of Curriculum & Teaching

Course Description

"The Camino teaches. It teaches through its rhythms, rituals, symbols, conversations, sounds, musics, silences, landscapes, blisters, and encounters with others."

This course takes place along the final 100 km (62 miles) of the Camino Portugués in Galicia, Spain, where walking, place, sound, music, encounter and dialogue become the setting for thinking about curriculum and learning. Rather than treating curriculum as something that exists only in a syllabus, classroom or plan, students consider it as something lived and continually shaped by our relationships with places, people, histories, sounds, stories and one another.

Music and listening are woven throughout as ways of encountering and coming to know place. No musical background is needed, and students do not need to identify as musicians. The focus is not musical skill or performance but what becomes possible when we attend to music, sound and listening. Each day, students take part in field-based inquiry through guiding questions, field journals, sound recordings, photography, conversations, interviews and artifacts of encounter. Daily seminars give time to think together about what we notice, so the course's questions and directions emerge in conversation with the Camino itself.

The course includes at least 30 instructional hours: 4 hours of virtual sessions before departure, about 20 hours of field-based inquiry across five walking days, and about 10.5 hours of daily reflective seminars in Spain.

Course Topics

Guiding curricular understandings

• Curriculum as lived experience
• Place-based education
• Relationality and dialogue
• Narrative and autobiography
• Learning through uncertainty and emergence
• The tension between planned and lived curriculum

Guiding sound and musical understandings

• Pilgrimage songs and historical musical traditions of the Camino
• Local music traditions in Galicia
• Soundscapes of pilgrimage
• Musicking as communal practice
• Music, sound and ritual
• Listening as a curricular act

Anticipated Stakeholder Engagement

Engagement on this course happens mainly through encounters along the route rather than formal site visits:

• Fellow pilgrims and people met along the Camino
• Local and pilgrimage music traditions
• Daily seminars and dinner gatherings

Tentative Route: Porto → train to Vigo → Redondela → Pontevedra → Caldas de Reis → Padrón → Milladoiro → Santiago de Compostela. Walking days run 5–13 miles.