A radical holistic edge-fusion learning space with a collection of really useful collaborative tools for making social-ecological just change.
A radical holistic edge-fusion learning space with a collection of really useful collaborative tools for making social-ecological just change.
Workshops
HEdge Space
A Holistic Do-it-Together Tool kit.
Praxis tools to support people bring about just change, together
ABOUT
The
Research
About this research and the resources on the website
Introduction
HEdge Space was a collaborative research project which co-produced creative holistic workshops as a radical environmental adult and community education practice.
​​This research in turn led to the creation of the Hedgespace.net website which is an open-source public community learning resource. It shares the holistic praxis tools that were co-produced experientially with co-researchers through our collective praxis journey. It also shares workshop resources which were produced through the PhD alongside, but outside of, the co-researching project.
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A participatory Action Research (PAR) approach, with its roots in Adult Education, was used to undertake this research. PAR is collaborative research involving ‘collective self-reflective enquiry, the co-construction of knowledge, and the development of skills for speaking back to power and organizing for change with others’ (Kemmis and McTaggart 1998, p. 5)​.
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Research Aim
The overarching PhD research aim was to co-develop creative transdisciplinary feminist tools to support greater public participation in social-environmental justice movements and to approach education for sustainability as a radical and deep practice.
This practice was informed by radical Adult Education approaches orientated to emancipatory social change and used a holistic arts-based participatory action research methodology.
Each of these practices seek to address social-environmental problem through collaborative and holistic forms of knowledge making. However, such collaboration across fields entails the reality of working with different forms of knowledge and different groups of people, including public participation. There can also be conflicts of interest and conflicting views on the problems shaped by pollical values which lead to challenging power dynamics within such collaborations.
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The website contains a collection of holistic praxis workshops which encompass an edge-fusion of practices brought into relationship with each other to enable holistic and embodied learning and collaboration to occur. Therefore, the holistic praxis workshops weave together forms of knowledge that are political, creative, scientific, spiritual, economic and ecological through which to explore the issues of injustice effecting people lives and collective actions to bring about structural change.
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To ensure an emancipatory orientation was maintained the workshops are rooted in Adult and Community Education, in the traditions of feminist and popular education, art-based and environmental adult education. The workshop praxis also borrows from the arts and crafts movement, social practice forms of art such as, community arts, arts & ecology, New Genre Public Art and interventionist art as well as (social) permaculture.
engages in critical allyship with transdisciplinary learning and research and the sustainable development goals (SDGs). ​​ STEAM education,
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Feminist Public STEAM workshops based on the concept of small-scale making praxis.​
They aim to offer an inclusive, holistic, creative and dynamic approach to bottom-up community organizing in a participatory democracy to bring about cultural, political and economic systems that support life to flourish. These workshops are about supporting people and communities to find their agency and claim power, and to keep creativity, hope, and the belief that change is possible at their core.
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Who can use these Resources:
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​These resources can be used by anyone involved in social-environmental justice movement organizing such as activists, facilitators, educators, artists, community workers and researchers.
This could be within grassroots social justice movement groups, NGO's, community and sustainable development, and various education and art contexts. For example, adult and community education, community and participatory arts, education for sustainable development, social studies, sociology, public engagement, participatory action research, transdisciplinary learning and research, policy making, activism, formal and non-formal education.
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Who could participate in the research?
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The research project, originating in The Burren, Co. Clare, Ireland, was open to anyone with an interest in working to bring about just change using collaborative, critical and creative eco-embodied workshops. 14 public co-researchers were involved in the research, with another 40 people participating in various public workshop events.​​​
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The Research Problem
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The overarching research context sought to co-develop creative transdisciplinary feminist tools as a 'deep education for sustainability' practice informed by radical Adult Education practices orientated to emancipatory social change.
Each of these practices seek to address social-environmental problem through collaborative and holistic forms of knowledge making.
There are however differences between these practices in the way they view how social-environmental problems are generated in the first instance and in how they approach collaboration and problem solving. Adult Education interrogates how power, knowledge and culture lead to social inequality and environmental destruction. Transdisciplinary learning and research linked to the sustainability agenda primarily looks to science for solutions albeit in consultation with public and other stakeholders and also acknowledges the inherent problems of power and politics in these issues. Education for Sustainability is oriented to embedding the sustainability agenda into education. However, the concept of sustainability, has evolved along many lines and has been called sustainababble and an idea which can be applied in weak and shallow ways, especially with regard to the concept of sustainable development implemented using neoliberal informed policies.​​​​
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Radical adult education is group-based experiential learning for collective action praxis which aims to empower people to effect social and environmental justice change. In this project, creative and nature-based workshops as a learning for action approach were co-developed with members of the public using a participatory action research (PAR) approach. PAR is a research approach which originated from the Latin American popular education movement. ​
As Antonio Gramsci highlighted, 'the greatest trick of oppressive power is to convince people that change is not possible', the job of radical learning is to critically reflect on that idea, stimulate our social imagination around the alternatives are to systems of injustice, and raise consciousness of our collective capacity to bring about alternatives that better serve people. It is hopeful education. In the words of Raymond Williams 'To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing'.
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I am interested in this approach. What can it achieve?
About PAR in a PhD, and this PhD.
PAR in a PhD can be a complex situation due to tensions between the principles of PAR and radical Ault Education which challenge formal modes and sites of knowledge production, such as, higher education institutes and accreditation. Par within a PhD places this community-based research within a formal examinations process which has certain requirements which must be fulfilled. As an arts-based practice-based PhD this required the undertaking of a creative practice and the production of creative artefacts and a text-based Exegesis (a practice-based thesis, and somewhat different to a traditional thesis).​
The creative practice was situated in social-practice art, specifically new genre public art which resonates with art-based adult education. The creative experiences and artefacts this produced was the workshops, the documentation of the workshops and the curation of the creative pedagogy practice journey and the documentation of the outcome on the website. The website showcases the local knowledge produced to meet local social-ecological action needs. ​The exegesis reports on this practice and situates it within the overarching research context and the research knowledge fields in a contemporary and historical context.
The exegesis goes deeper into the values and implications of this PAR to the fields of practice it informs both in practice and for scholarship.​The exegesis also discusses the originally praxis starting point framing of the research, related to developing a feminist public STEAM praxis to respond to large scale production and consumptions practice (SDG's) and the shift to an art-based praxis whith the praxis starting point as 'how do we make change together'.​Due to these shifts a diverse set of tools were developed, some co-developed through the co-researching phase of the research and others developed throughout the lifecycle of the research. ​Therefore these two research journeys are both told in the exegesis and the diverse resources they produced are shared on the website.
​​Abstract
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COMING SOON