Conference Program

Contemporary debates on democratic educational landscapes increasingly emphasize openness, porosity, and participation, particularly in relation to the overlapping of educational, civic, and ecological spaces. Schools are no longer understood solely as bounded institutions, but as part of wider landscapes in which learning, social interaction, and democratic practices are negotiated across spatial and institutional borders. Yet these debates often remain tied to architectural form or programmatic intention, while the processes through which democratic agency actually emerges in everyday educational practice remain under-theorized. This paper proposes an ecological reading of educational space, understanding educational landscapes not as static or bounded entities, but as living systems whose democratic quality depends on their capacity for access, adaptation, and continuous transformation across spatial scales.
Against this backdrop, the paper draws on a learning design framework originally developed in constructionist learning (Papert, 1980) and later expanded in the context of creative learning (Resnick, 2017). Recently translated into the field of pedagogical architecture (Moog, 2026), the framework is here situated within debates on porosity, open systems, and democratic participation, and used as an analytical lens to examine how educational landscapes can actively enable democratic practices rather than merely accommodate them.

Drawing on open systems theory (von Bertalanffy, 1968), educational landscapes can be understood as porous configurations in which boundaries between spaces, actors, and practices remain negotiable rather than fixed.Porosity does not primarily refer to architectural openness, but to the capacity of spatial arrangements and development processes to enable exchange between formal and informal learning, between school and community, and between different forms of knowledge and expertise. Democratic participation emerges under these conditions as a situated practice produced through access, negotiation, and shared responsibility over time.
Participatory school development processes make these dynamics visible where spatial transitions are jointly designed, shared zones support multiple uses, and pupils, teachers, and other stakeholders engage in real spatial decisions with tangible consequences. Research on participatory school building highlights how such processes foster democratic learning and agency (Zenke, 2020). Studies on innovative learning environments further emphasize that the robustness of such spaces depends on sustained participation and alignment between educational vision and spatial practice (Frelin & Grannäs, 2021). Work on pedagogical architecture underlines the importance of a shared language between pedagogy and design for maintaining participatory processes across professional and institutional boundaries (Weyland, 2017).

This understanding of educational landscapes as porous and open systems connects to broader theoretical discussions on urban and spatial openness (Sennett, 2018) and resonates with current European research on educational transformation, such as the CLEAR project (2025). More recent contributions further frame schools as places of dwelling rather than fixed institutions, foregrounding long-term inhabitation and everyday practice as central to democratic educational landscapes (Weyland & Sigillo, 2025).
Rather than presenting a new empirical case, the paper synthesizes insights from participatory school development practice and contemporary research to propose a transferable analytical perspective. It argues that democratic educational landscapes emerge where spatial porosity and participatory processes intersect, enabling education to be experienced as a shared, negotiated, and continuously evolving democratic practice.