About this Research Topic

Background

As well as formal education, all human beings have the right to participate in the community's cultural life, enjoy the arts, and share in scientific advancement and its benefits, according to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. To participate in any non-formal education places, such as museums, art galleries, science centers, zoos, planetariums, national parks, online exhibitions etc., is an essential means to provide diverse populations the opportunity to have access and be included in these processes. These places can benefit children, young and adult people with special education needs since they offer unique and multisensorial ways of engaging with its contents. Through interactive and immersive exhibitions and other types of activities, accompanied or not by educators or museum staff, these visitors can learn outside of school.

We acknowledge that although the fight for the rights of people with disabilities has been underway for many decades, only more recently has this right of being included in the scientific and cultural lives begun to be systematically acknowledged by institutions and organizations. At present, we still have a small amount of research being published about how people with disabilities interact, experience, and learn in this context. At the same pace, only a few documents report case studies, lessons learned, and challenges that different cultural and scientific institutions, educators, curators, and other professionals face when planning, implementing, and providing accessible and inclusive programming for a diverse range of populations. Also, there is still a gap in research that approaches the learning, experience, and opinions of people with disabilities and special education needs in these environments.

With this session, we want to learn from diverse initiatives around the globe that can facilitate the learning, leisure, and engagement of people with disabilities and special education needs in non-formal education places. Research and case studies that address access, accessibility, inclusion, and special education needs strategies in out-of-school programs and non-formal education environments, as well as methods, methodologies, theoretical and practical tools for interpreting, evaluating, and integrating the learning and visitors’ experiences, are welcome. We appreciate the proposals that include a diverse range of authors and value the voices, opinions, and perceptions of this targeted audience – people with disabilities and those with special education needs. We are therefore delighted to invite researchers, educators, museums, and similar institutions' professionals to submit papers that aim to discuss, in practice and theory, issues around the inclusion in non-formal education spaces and how visitors experience and can learn from them.

Keywords: inclusion, non-formal education places, diversity, accessibility, special education needs

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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