Conference Program

This paper addresses how the teaching profession is being reshaped by platformisation, datafication and algorithmic governance in the current perma-polycrisis, where economic instability, democratic fatigue and ecological stress intersect. In marginal and inner-peripheral territories, digital transformation does not simply “modernise” education: it can operate as an extractive governance assemblage that captures value upward (data, attention, labour and resources), compresses local agency, and repositions teachers as compliance-driven executors. To conceptualise this condition, the paper mobilises the notion of Digital Mining Neo-Elitarism (DMN) as a soft extractive regime in which human actors co-govern with nonhuman agents (platform interfaces, interoperability standards, learning analytics dashboards, metrics, and infrastructural constraints). The core claim is that educational democracy depends on how we govern with technologies, not merely on how we teach through them.

The study reframes Universities’ and Research Institutions’ Third Mission (TM) as a more-than-human governance project: a democratic and redistributive infrastructure capable of enabling collective problem-framing, capability-building, and access to cohesion resources. In this view, the proposed Territorial Cohesion Ecosystem (TCE) functions as a counter-extractive, generative arrangement that redistributes agency and responsibility across teachers, third-sector organisations, local administrations, and public knowledge infrastructures. ECT is further anchored in a quintuple-helix orientation (government, economy, environment, research, citizenship) and is interpreted as a form of horizontal subsidiarity between pedagogy and politics, where democracy is both a curricular aim (“learning for democracy”) and an organising principle of educational processes (“democracy for learning”).

Empirically, the paper reports a longitudinal action-research intervention in Southern Salento (Apulia, Italy) involving 70 teachers from three Comprehensive Institutes, alongside third-sector organisations, municipalities, and research actors connected to CNR infrastructures. The intervention unfolded through three phases—activation, co-planning, and organisation—supported by governance devices such as Territorial Educational Pacts and Community Observatories. Methodologically, the study combines: Needs Mapping within Action Community Learning (deep listening oriented to social justice); participatory design (GOPP and World Café) for co-defining objectives and responsibilities; qualitative tools (focus groups, observation, questionnaires) to surface situated impacts such as teacher burnout and platform-related workload; and a research–training pathway aligned with DigiCompEdu 3.3.

Findings show a shift in professional posture: teachers increasingly reframed digital competence as democratic agency, moving from “executors” to agency architects who interrogate platform constraints, redesign learning toward participation and dialogic pedagogy, and foreground ethical responsibility. At ecosystem level, ECT-supported facilitation contributed to the institutionalisation of collaboration (pacts, observatories), clearer role distribution, and improved capacity to mobilise cohesion resources. A tangible indicator was the production of teacher-designed action plans and the translation of co-design outputs into concrete project artefacts (plans, pacts, funding applications). Finally, the opening of CNR research infrastructures to communities—including learners in educational poverty—reconfigured infrastructures as knowledge commons, enabling hybrid learning environments and new conditions for civic participation.

The paper contributes a transferable framework for counter-extractive co-governance in education, while noting limitations related to single-context evidence and the persistence of governance atomism; future work should develop explicit social-justice indicators and test replicability across inner-peripheral territories.