Collage as a Co-Created Site of Inquiry for Becoming Inclusive

Enacting inclusive pedagogy in the mainstream classroom is both challenging and complex for student teachers. Literature (Pantic and Florian, 2015) positions inclusive pedagogy within the broader theory of social justice and views the student teacher as an agent of change. Eschewing the Cartesian mind/body dualism where inclusive practice is seen as a mental phenomenon and a non-physical pursuit as a self-conscious lone agent, I share findings from a doctoral research assemblage that sees matter as vital, and where the messiness and complexity of the space affects the inclusive pedagogy enacted. Human and non-human, material things, spaces, places, and the environment, are entangled in a symphony of encounters in the classroom. These unexpected encounters noticed through the experiences of the student teachers on practicum placement, are re-presented through collage as arts-based methodology. Collage is an effective tool to approach such an intangible topic as inclusive practice and afforded the researcher and participants to co-create large scale works using magazine cut-outs and found materials to reveal the entanglement of matter in the classroom space and the agentic effect on practice. The collages the participants created and re-created, are themselves a metamorphosis; a transformational piece of art that revealed over time the changes of the participants’ beliefs, practices, and values on their journey to becoming inclusive. The process of making the large collage had been a state of immersion in the activity, enjoyment and a sense of participation or a flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990). As I created my own collage in response to the collages and conversations of the participants, I found that I fostered empathy and deepened connections to open experience and make the familiar strange (Mannay, 2010). The collages communicated visually new insights into the possibilities for transforming inclusive pedagogy.