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Towards a post-humanist design for educational inclusion
Summary
This participatory action research project worked with residents of a litter-polluted Belgian coastline to develop arts-based educational approaches that foster greater awareness of how plastic pollution damages shared living environments for humans and wildlife alike. While focused on pedagogy, the study underscores how community engagement and environmental literacy are important complements to scientific research on plastic pollution.
In this contribution to the special issue on adult education, inclusion and justice we discuss how an inclusive pedagogy can foster a more just way of inhabiting litter polluted living environments, in which the interests of both human and non-human dwellers are taken into consideration. More precisely, we theorize how arts can function as study material and enable a collective sensitivity for the ways in which (non-)human entities (e.g., fishermen, seals, birds, litter pickers, tourists, plastic producers) constitute a ‘sick’ habitat. Based upon our theory-driven participatory action research with adult inhabitants of the litter polluted Belgian coast, we conclude that a study pedagogy has the power to constitute collective events of emancipation in which inhabitants of damaged living environments can start to inhabit these places, i.e., they become (more) attentive to the reciprocal relationships with other human and non-human entities and respond accordingly with care towards these entanglements.
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