Conference Program

This paper engages with the debate on the relationship between education and democracy, arguing that the democratic relevance of educational processes cannot be reduced to individual outcomes alone, but also concerns participation, shared responsibility and cooperation within local contexts. From this perspective, the paper presents an evaluative study on the impact of the Comunità Educante Evoluta (CEE) project, implemented in the Zisa-Danisinni area of Palermo, to explore the conditions under which an educational intervention may generate transformations that outlast the project and open up the possibility of forms of educational governance oriented to the common good.

The case is situated in an urban context marked by structural vulnerability and educational poverty, understood not as immediate conditions, but as the outcome of layered historical, urban and relational processes. Theoretically and methodologically, the paper adopts a processual and relational perspective on social change, consistent with a theory-based, realist and qualitative approach to evaluation. Within this framework, impact is not conceived as a linear causal relationship between intervention and outcome, but as a complex, gradual and multilevel process reconstructed through plausible attribution, generative mechanisms and contextual conditions (Abbott, 2016; Archer, 2015; Giddens, 1984; Pawson, 2016; Westhorp, 2018).

Accordingly, the research design distinguishes between micro, meso and macro levels in order to capture transformations in the experiences of children and families, in the professional repertoires of educational actors, and in the network and governance configurations of the local area. The methodological strategy employs tools capable of capturing change in its experiential, symbolic, relational and temporal dimensions.

Findings show that the most relevant effects of the intervention do not primarily lie in measurable school outcomes, but in cultural shifts, relational transformations and reorientations of educational practices. At the macro level, the study highlights a process through which education is redefined as a shared responsibility, no longer understood in exclusively school-centred terms. At the meso level, stronger forms of collaboration emerge among schools, practitioners, families and local actors. At the micro level, change takes shape through processes of recognition, motivation, trust and empowerment, leading to shifts in the ways subjects relate to others, to themselves and to educational experience. The educative community thus emerges as a lived relational configuration.

At the same time, the study highlights the fragility of these processes. Change is recognised as real, yet not fully stabilised: it remains exposed to contextual discontinuities, actor variability and the lack of stable institutional arrangements capable of sustaining it over time. From this perspective, the paper reads the CEE case as a threshold between project-based educational action and educational commons. Rather than documenting an established commons, the evaluation makes visible the conditions under which practices of educational commoning may consolidate over time. In this sense, the case study shows how democracy is constructed within educational practices, and how participation, togetherness and shared responsibility may emerge within processes of building an educative community, while remaining exposed to the risk of reversibility in the absence of recognition and institutionalisation (Cappello et al., 2024; Cappello & Siino, 2023).