Abstract:

The COVID-19 pandemic precipitated a structural reorganization of educational practice, compelling institutions to migrate rapidly from physical classrooms to online platforms. While this digital shift expanded access and flexibility, it also exposed a persistent challenge in literature education: the erosion of embodied engagement, shared presence, and communal imagination. Students learned to navigate screens with increasing efficiency, yet often experienced reading as an act of extraction rather than encounter, analyzing information rather than inhabiting meaning.

In this context, Wandering Literature (WL) emerged as a pedagogical response to disruption; not merely as a technological adaptation, but as a principled rehumanization of learning. The WL initiative is grounded in a constructivist and inquiry-based philosophy that views learning as an active process of knowledge construction within a community of inquiry. In contrast to traditional frontal teaching, centered on the transmission of knowledge, WL enacts a process of "wandering," both literally and metaphorically, across four interconnected dimensions:
1. The geographical, in which learners walk through the physical landscapes on and about which literary works were written;
2. The textual, in which readers traverse the aesthetic and semantic terrain of narrative worlds;
3. The digital, where modern technologies provide access to virtual reconstructions; and
4. The personal, where learners integrate their own experiences, memories, and affective responses.

The objectives of WL are multidimensional. It encourages innovative, project-based teaching methods that highlight the communal and cultural nature of learning; creates environments that merge inquiry with creativity; and brings literature out of libraries and classrooms into the public, geographical spaces that inspire it. Within the WL framework, literary reading becomes a multisensory and interdisciplinary encounter, one that invites students to see, touch, hear, and even "taste" the text through sensory and spatial exploration. Such encounters bridge the distance between reader and work, transforming literature from an abstract school subject into a lived cultural experience.

Three case studies illustrate the pedagogical impact of the model. In the short story "Tel Aviv" by Savion Liebrecht, students conducted a multisensory walking tour linking narrative motifs to urban history and collective memory. In the "Forbidden Journeys to Petra" unit, learners participated in a digital reconstruction of literary myths, engaging in critical reflection on national identity through virtual storytelling. In a bibliotherapeutic adaptation of Émile Ajar’s "The Life Before Us", students explored empathy, resilience, and self-understanding through digital immersion and dialogic activities. Across all cases, participants demonstrated enhanced interpretive depth, emotional literacy, and a renewed sense of relevance in literary study.

The paper argues that when students and teachers move, physically or virtually, through texts and spaces, they rediscover literature as a participatory, empathetic, and integrative practice. WL thus offers a replicable framework for teacher education and a sustainable model for reimagining literary pedagogy in times of crisis and technological transformation, applicable to both elementary and secondary education.

Keywords:

Pedagogical innovation, experiential learning, digital technologies, teacher training, literary education.