Conference Program

Contemporary debates on early childhood education increasingly recognize children as active citizens capable of participation and meaning-making within democratic communities and entitled to exercise their rights within educational contexts (Commissione Europea, 2021; Consiglio d’Europa, 2022). However, educational practices often privilege the cognitive and linguistic dimensions of democratic experience, while the sensory, emotional, and relational foundations of it remain marginal (UNESCO, 2021; Nussbaum 2010).

Drawing on Luigina Mortari’s reflections on freedom and education, democracy requires citizens capable of thinking and acting in unexpected ways. As Mortari argues, “Totalitarianism asserts itself only by depriving citizens of their capacity to invent new worlds, because democracy vitally requires citizens who think in unexpected ways and who cannot be found -either in thought or in action- where those who hold power would like them to be in order to govern them” (Mortari, 2018, p. 106).

Starting from this reflection, the paper explores the meaning of feeling and the right to feel as fundamental educational dimensions for the construction of democratic citizenship from early childhood. Article 31 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child recognizes children’s right to participate freely in cultural and artistic life (United Nations, 1989). Yet this right should not only be interpreted as access to cultural activities, but also as the opportunity to develop the capacity to perceive, express, and interpret emotions, relationships, and experiences through shared artistic practices. In this perspective, feeling means being present: inhabiting the time of experience and developing that relational sensitivity that makes free and responsible action within a shared space possible (Dewey, 1934; Biesta, 2013; Mortari, 2015).

The capacity to think and act in unexpected ways -identified by Mortari as a vital condition for democracy- finds a meaningful pedagogical analogy in the practice of musical improvisation. Making music together can be understood as a genuine training ground for presence, where individuals immerse themselves in the vital flow of plural relationality through which each person shapes their humanity (Small, 1998; Branca, 2012; Zbranca et al., 2022; Higgins 2024). The relational dimension of making music clearly emerges playing together: through this process, musicians gradually learn to “breathe in unison,” building a form of shared attunement (Murakami & Ozawa, 2019). In this sense, musical experience -particularly collective improvisation- offers a unique pedagogical context for developing what can be described as micro-democratic competences that sustain children’s participation in shared social life: attentive listening, the ability to suspend one’s own intervention, openness to the unexpected, responsiveness to others, and the co-construction of meaning within a

shared process. Improvisation requires participants to remain present in the unfolding moment and to respond through gestures, sounds, pauses, and silences, practicing democratic relationality (Consiglio d’Europa, 2018; Bertinetto, 2021; Eurydice 2025).

This contribution therefore argues that collective musical improvisation can function as an early pedagogical laboratory of democratic participation, where children experience -through listening, responsiveness and co-creation- the relational competences that sustain democratic life, cultivating aware citizens capable of engaging creatively with the sonic and social worlds they inhabit (Cambi, 2016).