Conference Program

In contemporary university contexts, is it possible to conceive of a redistribution of spaces of power that positions students as intentional co-constructors of their own learning processes and of the organisation of knowledge? How might one move towards a co-design process, while rethinking its aims and possibilities?

At the conceptual level, this requires moving beyond the notion of devolution to the student (Brousseau, 1998). Devolution does not eliminate asymmetry, nor does it diminish the teacher’s power. The student is placed in a system that nonetheless remains conceived and organised by the teacher. What emerges is a partial and subordinate form of agency, one that allows room for action only within boundaries predefined and designed by others.

Due to cultural and organisational constraints, the contemporary higher education context remains strongly shaped by an asymmetrical relationship between teacher and student; nonetheless, micro-spaces of co-design exist and can attenuate the teacher’s authority and redistribute it more diffusely. In doing so, they make visible two epistemological horizons that we consider to be foundational and generative.

1) The evolution of design within architecture and engineering. A full understanding of people’s needs and aspirations can only be achieved by involving them in the design process, as they are the primary experts on their own lived experience. For this reason, actively involving people with lived experience from the earliest stages of the design process appears indispensable. This shift has marked a passage from user-centred design to co-design, insofar as designers are required to engage with users’ tacit knowledge and latent needs (Augsten & Gekeler, 2017; Örnekoğlu-Selçuk et alii, 2024).

When transposed into learning design, this perspective suggests rethinking design itself as a formative process, shifting it from something structured into something structuring. It can’t be reduced to a matter of starting from students’ needs or from a contextual diagnosis. Rather, it entails connecting and orchestrating the fragments of knowledge, experience, and action that students bring with them (Ozdemir & Clark, 2007).

2) The shift from devolution to interaction within an ecosystemic perspective. Within the ecosystem, transformative processes assume a central role, since transformation unfolds in a co-evolutionary and collaborative manner (Pentucci, 2021). Actors transform their world together and are, in turn, transformed by it, within a continuous flow that unfolds as a dynamic cycle of interactions between actors and environment (Stetsenko, 2008; 2017). Through these interactions, human, non-human, and digital agents intentionally enact a form of co-agency (Singh & Engeness, 2025) that is not subordinated to the power or intention of others, but emerges dialogically. This opens up micro-spaces of action and intentionality.

In order to explore how these horizons may emerge from practice, this contribution presents several micro-scenarios in which spaces of co-design are opened within university teaching. Through these examples, we discuss whether teaching can shift from devolution to interaction and shared power, recognising students as dialogic subjects and fostering the ecosystem’s emergence.