Playful Participatory Approaches with Educators Facilitating Environmental Awareness

Abstract

Design of activities and learning resources for environmental awareness in formal learning spaces are known to reflect specific curriculum objectives. School teachers face several challenges in contextualizing these resources for students, who in turn are increasingly expected to become informed decision makers and develop action competence. Yet research towards shared spaces for teachers, students and designers to explore complexities of environment knowledge and issues remains insufficient. Our study looks at participatory research with school communities to explore tools and methods for co-creating educational activities for environmental awareness in peri-urban India. We aim to explore the challenges and opportunities in teacher practices through in-situ inquiry processes. We seek to understand how play within participatory approaches might allow exploration of teachers' notions and practices of environmental awareness facilitation; and how we may design such approaches and interventions. In this PhD we seek to develop methods to engage teachers in design processes and develop a range of activity materials as cases.