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Convenor(s): Serena Goracci (Indire, Italy); Luisa Zecca (University of Milano Bicocca, Italy); Laura Parigi (Indire, Italy); Loredana Camizzi (Indire, Italy)
Presentation 5
Seeing Together, Experiencing Together, Thinking Together: Civic Education through the Collaborative Exploration of Images
Evelina Ivanova-Vardzhiyska
Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski, Bulgaria
Contemporary approaches to civic education increasingly emphasise learning democracy as a lived and collaborative experience rather than as a purely conceptual domain of knowledge. Within this perspective, educational practices that foster dialogue, shared inquiry, and the interpretation of multiple perspectives play a crucial role in developing democratic competences. This paper presents the results of the School Innovation Lab “Educational Integration and Civic Education”, developed within the national project “Innovation in Action” initiated by the Bulgarian Ministry of Education. The lab focused on designing and testing an innovative cooperative learning model based on the collaborative exploration of visual images in educational contexts. The proposed model uses images as a starting point for collective observation, interpretation, and dialogue. Through structured collaborative activities, students are encouraged to see together, share experiences and perspectives, and gradually construct meaning through discussion and reflection. In this way, working with images becomes not only an aesthetic or interpretative exercise, but also a pedagogical pathway for developing key democratic competences such as perspective-taking, argumentation, empathy, and participation in shared inquiry. The paper outlines the theoretical foundations of the model, describes the stages of its development within the innovation lab, and presents a set of ready-to-use instructional activities applicable across subjects and educational levels. It thus contributes a transferable pedagogical model demonstrating how the collaborative exploration of images can support interdisciplinary approaches to civic education and foster democratic learning practices in diverse educational contexts. Through the collaborative exploration of images, students do not simply analyse visual material; they engage in a shared process of inquiry in which democratic learning unfolds as seeing together, experiencing together, and thinking together.
