Walking with the past: Teaching life narrative through a wartime memory walk in Tartu

This article explores the pedagogical potential of memory walks in teaching life writing through an experiential module conducted in Tartu, Estonia. Drawing on my family archive and the city’s layered urban landscape, I guided students along routes shaped by wartime destruction, Soviet occupation, and inherited familial memory. Building on Diana Taylor’s distinction between archive and repertoire, Murray and Järviluoma’s transgenerational walking methodology, and Karen Till’s and Christina Moretti’s work on place and walking, I examine how movement through historically marked spaces enables students to experience memory as embodied, relational and situated. The walk foregrounded tensions between official historiography and familial narratives, inviting students to encounter historical truth as negotiated rather than singular. Through sensory engagement, storytelling and reflective writing tasks, students explored how urban landscapes carry traces of loss, absence and political power. In my paper I want to show how memory walks can function as a pedagogy of emplacement, transforming life writing from textual self-representation into a performative, spatial and dialogical practice. In this approach, truth emerges not as fixed recollection but through embodied attention to the layered interplay of past and present, self and place.