Designing Inclusive Ocean Literacy for Sustainability Through Minhwa (Korean Folk Painting): A Documentary Visual Case Study and 100-Case Synthetic Method Audit

Education for sustainability should connect planetary environmental change with local place, cultural meaning, and feasible collective action. Yet inclusive arts-based ocean-literacy education remains underexamined, especially for children from migrant backgrounds. This study examines Gyeongju Sea Rescue Team: Protecting the Sea through Minhwa, a five-session programme for elementary-school children from Koryoin and other migrant-background families in South Korea. A provenance-separated dual-strand design combined hybrid thematic analysis of programme documents and non-identifying artwork images with a fully synthetic 100-case corpus used only to audit a future artwork-elicitation protocol and codebook. The documentary strand identified four provisional mechanisms: the ecological reinterpretation of auspicious symbols, localisation through Gyeongju’s maritime heritage, multimodal participation across linguistic differences, and collective stewardship. The synthetic audit did not validate these mechanisms or programme outcomes. Instead, participant-correction and self-action prompts generated more clearly codable material on agency, cultural identity, multilingual meaning-making, and intercultural integration. Two designed perturbation passes yielded a quadratic-weighted kappa of 0.726 as a within-corpus stability diagnostic rather than human intercoder reliability. Diagnostic cases exposed adult projection, assimilationist interpretation, pressure to disclose private meanings, and advice without self-agency. The article proposes a provisional MIOL framework and four safeguards: child-led interpretation, reciprocal cultural exchange, appropriate consent and permissions, and continuity from symbolic expression to sustained action. Synthetic outputs concern method development only and do not represent children’s experiences or programme effectiveness.