By James M. Lang

One of the great passions in my life over the past dozen years has been traveling—a pursuit that fits well with the academic profession's flexible hours and conferences in far-flung locations.

"If it were up to me," I said to my wife a few weeks ago, "I would spend the rest of my life traveling."

She pointed out some logistical problems with that idea, such as my job, marriage, and five children. But she also asked me, out of curiosity, what it was about traveling that engaged me so deeply. I had never really thought about the why of it all, but the answer I reached is not surprising, given my profession.

What I love about traveling is learning.

Every strange new place you visit—and the stranger the better, as far as I'm concerned—opens up the opportunity to meet new people, discover new cultures, feel new sensations, and add to the storehouse of experiences and perspectives which you can use to move through the world. Travel offers opportunities for deep learning experiences because of the way in which it naturally engages with multiple senses.

Having an amateur historian's interest in Irish history, I have read multiple accounts of the 1916 Easter uprising. And however much I may have been moved and impressed by the accounts of the execution of its leaders, nothing I read came close to the experience of standing, as I have on two trips to Ireland, in the courtyard where the executions took place, putting my fingers into bullet holes in the stones, and smelling the spring air that those men breathed in their final moments on earth.

In the scholarship on teaching and learning, you can find all kinds of research on the importance of multisensory learning experiences. I suspect most of us can recall travel experiences, too, in which people, events, or texts that we have studied came alive.

Unless we are teaching in a study-abroad program, though, most of us teach our students at a remove from primary objects, events, texts, or experiences. In an ideal world, I would travel around England with students in my survey course on British literature. In the actual world, I sit in a classroom with them three days a week and talk about works they have read on thin pages in a big fat literature anthology.

Last semester, though, I observed a junior colleague, Bryan Carella, who gave his students more of a taste of that ideal world than I have ever done. With his permission, I thought I would describe what he did in his classroom, in the interest of seeing whether others might be similarly inspired.

I observed Bryan's class as a part of our department's third-year-review process. He teaches medieval literature, and the subject on the day I observed was traveling and travel literature during the medieval period. During the first part of the class, he reviewed the reasons people might have traveled during that era, the perils they would have faced, and the literature that developed as a result.

One of the main reasons people traveled in that period, he explained, was to take religious pilgrimages. As he spoke, he listed on the board the kinds of pilgrimages that people took.

Then he clapped his hands and said: "So let's go on a pilgrimage."

I thought perhaps he was going to show us some kind of simulated pilgrimage in a PowerPoint presentation, but instead he strode to the back of the classroom and out the door. The students, seemingly not surprised, got up and followed. I did, too.

We teach at a Roman Catholic college, and our campus contains both a beautiful chapel and a variety of religious statues and monuments. The first leg of our pilgrimage took us to a statue that overlooks a pond at the campus entrance. Bryan jumped up onto a bench and spoke for a few minutes about pilgrimages to holy spots.

Then we were off again, down a path that bordered a wooded incline. He paused and told the students about pilgrimages for purposes of penance. People who undertook such pilgrimages, he explained, might have found ways to increase purposefully the usual sufferings attendant upon travel.

"So," he said, removing his sandals, "those of you who feel the need to do some penance should take off your shoes and follow me up the hill." He then walked barefoot over the leaves and sticks; the students and myself—all shod, apparently unrepentant—followed him up through the woods to another campus pathway.

From there we were led to the chapel, where he offered an overview of the kinds of activities and people that we might have seen in a medieval cathedral.

Back in the classroom, as Bryan moved into a discussion of the text on the syllabus for that day, I noticed, first and foremost, a renewed sense of energy in the students. Everyone's attention flags at some point over the course of a 75-minute class session, and I was struck by the way in which our pilgrimage had stimulated both the bodies and the minds of the students, opening them to contribute to the class discussion in the final minutes of class.

Afterward I asked Bryan to tell me how, and when, he began taking pilgrimages with his students in his courses.

"I was teaching Chaucer's Canterbury Tales during the spring semester of my first year," he said. "It was that time of the semester when we had our first spring day above 60 degrees. My class had been working hard, and we all wanted to enjoy the weather, but—of course—I still wanted them to learn something. I came up with the idea spontaneously. They loved it, and I've been developing it since then."

Incorporating hands-on experiences, he said, seems like a particularly crucial activity in courses in medieval literature. "My topics are often considered intimidating," he said. "Getting folks out of the classroom for some fun, as long as it has a purpose, here and there breaks up the hard work and adds another sensory experience to aid the learning process."

He doesn't limit his outside activities to pilgrimages, though. He has re-enacted Caesar's fight with the Helvetii out on the campus lawn and has given students in his Celtic-literature course a chance to try the sport of hurling, smacking a sliothar around with a hurley.

He also brings activities inside the classroom. "I like to reify things for my students," he said, "so I try to bring relevant objects into class. I have a Roman coin and an Anglo-Saxon coin that I pass around and use as a bridge to talk about related matters. Likewise, I have a leaf of a medieval manuscript and other kinds of artifacts. These serve as bridges to talk about the day's lesson."

Inspired by my pilgrimage with Bryan, I have spent some time during winter break planning a new event for my own students this semester. My survey course on British literature traditionally begins with the work of the Scottish poet Robert Burns, whose birthday is celebrated in Scotland in January with Burns Suppers—eating meals of haggis and other traditional foods, drinking whiskey, and reading and singing Burns's poems and songs.

So this semester my students will be hosting a Burns Supper for their fellow English majors, doing research on alternatives to haggis and whiskey that we could serve (Burns would not have approved, but our administration will), selecting poems to be read and songs to be sung, and reflecting on the place of Burns in the canon of British and Scottish literature.

If you still have a few days until the semester starts and have some planning energy left, I encourage you to follow in Bryan Carella's footsteps and see if you can find at least one new way to embark, with your students, on a pedagogical pilgrimage of your own this semester.

James M. Lang is an associate professor of English at Assumption College, in Worcester, Mass., and author of "On Course: A Week-by-Week Guide to Your First Semester of College Teaching" (Harvard University Press, 2008). He writes about teaching in higher education, and his Web site is http://www.jamesmlang.com. He welcomes reader mail directed to his attention at careers@chronicle.com.