Music in the city: teaching and learning through the senses

We live in multisensorial environments where tacit knowledge, from sensory perception and emotion, is key to navigating and making meaning of the world. Yet higher education heavily favours cognitive knowledge as a medium of instruction and learning, based on pedagogical concepts of knowing educator and learning student, leading to a hierarchy of intelligences. Explicitly incorporating sensory knowledge into teaching and learning practice enables students to become experts in their field, and it is the combination of sensory and cognitive knowledge that enriches learning. We explore the links between sensory perception, emotion and cognition through an urban anthropology lecture and a workshop that enable students to connect popular music with urban theory. This demonstrates the potential to incorporate sensory teaching and learning into other disciplines.