Joke Vandenabeele

Every year, third-year bachelor students participating in a course on adult education at the University of Leuven (Belgium) conduct an interview with adult educators working within a particular setting of adult education, such as civic integration courses, detention education, etc. In this article, we elaborate on one particular case, viz., adult educators working in second-chance education for adults who still want to obtain their secondary diploma. We show how their profession as an adult educator can become a common concern for both third bachelor students of educational sciences and for adult educators in second-chance adult education celebrating in 2021 their 40 years of existence in Flanders. This means that our analysis in this article will also show how a university can become a place where their daily professional practice as adult educators, viz., their ambitions and doubts, ambiguities and contradictions, can fully materialize as collective study material.

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.

In this paper, we take an interest in a recently emerged ‘DIY sports infrastructure’ in a Belgian city: the Open Gym. The purpose of our inquiry is to contribute to the literature regarding sports pedagogy by developing theoretical notions, based on empirical engagements, that render how these kinds of sports infrastructures could make up pedagogical places. This inquiry builds on a pedagogical notion of sports as education about, through, and in movement, and deployed theoretical resources of ‘new mobilities’ to direct its focus towards bodily movements. The methodology, informed by the idea of an ‘ethnographic navigation’, involved methods that focused on bodily movements of the researchers and other athletes, and rendered these into descriptive and reflective accounts. These accounts, shown in the findings, present bodily movements as (continuing) attachments, contingencies, and (decentralized) concentrations, resulting from more-or-less solid ties between human bodies and objects, incidental interactions mingling through these ties, and specific ways of coming together by mutual attention. Moreover, the accounts stage the Open Gym as two kinds of places: an interchangeably solid and flowing ‘congealed place’, and a common ground for action that is ‘a platform’. Finally, we introduce the notion of ‘learning to navigate’ to characterize what makes the Open Gym a pedagogical place. Propositions and questions about the empirical and methodological implications of the findings, and what can be learned from the Open Gym, are discussed.

When people decide to gather and repair broken devices together, it seems obvious that repairers and visitors gain all kinds of instrumental competences (e.g. repair knowledge, skills, and attitudes) and that they can also experience deeply a transformative learning process about, for example, the need to keep planetary boundaries within the sustainable limits of life. In this article we approach the educational dimension of repair cafés differently and sketch the outlines of a minor public pedagogy. We analyze repair cafés as situated and entangled assemblages of both human and non-human actors; assemblages that are always very local and that need to be analyzed as specific, designated places—and times—where something is at stake. The central focus of this article is on substantiating this notion of a minor public pedagogy by offering a detailed analysis of the particular pedagogic moments that emerge in these encounters between humans and things. The navigational capacity of this public pedagogy is minor in nature as it doesn’t create clear signposts of where to go as humans. Instead, it engenders many moments of and propels humans into a sensory sensitivity for inhabiting the world in the here-and-now.

In this article we address the issue of how an instrumental approach to sustainability education has dominated the scientific debate of the last 20 years. By conducting interviews and focus group interviews, we have investigated a community arts initiative in the Flemish city of Antwerp in which artists together with local inhabitants engaged in activities around two art installations and address the sustainability of a particular living environment. Our empirical study of this place-based initiative that we call a ‘critical zone observatory’ has been enriched by the work of Bruno Latour, Richard Sennett and Hans Schildermans. We conclude that a temporal and spatial shift in sustainability education (research) is needed from (1) development (a steady movement towards a planned future) and (2) human stewardship (the capability of people to shape their passive living environments) to (1) what we call co-sperity (a collective hope in the present) and (2) inhabitation (an attached and undetermined engagement with the dynamic of one’s habitat). By proposing a collective study pedagogy as an alternative to individual training, we suggest a need for future research on critical zone observatories.

Tactile spaces as learning environments influence individuals’ attitudes through social embeddedness or interconnections among people, and physical embodiedness through experiencing surroundings, potentially fostering deep commitments. When on-farm demonstrations operate as tactile spaces, they could potentially support the adoption of innovative agricultural practices. In this article, we introduce video analysis as a methodological approach to evaluate this potential of on-farm demonstration (OFD) as tactile spaces. We reflect upon this methodology with a lens on three Belgian on-farm demonstrations, each on a different topic with a different participant group, all including farmers. As a first result, this method assists in defining strengths and weaknesses of an OFD in terms of using its potential as a rich learning environment. Based on our cases, we suggest deliberately incorporating physical interaction opportunities and verbal references to the surroundings during OFDs, as our data reveals that physical embodiedness opportunities stimulate verbal and physical interactions. However, more research should confirm this. Secondly, our research resulted in lessons learned for future use of video to evaluate OFDs as tactile spaces, building on the VDA methodological framework of Nassauer and Legewie (2018). We summarise our insights in methodological guidelines, which can serve as a starting point to guide future research.