Conference Program

Democratic schooling depends not only on formal participatory structures but on the professional capacity of teachers to enact public purposes within politically and economically demanding reform environments (Biesta, 2011). While scholarship increasingly foregrounds teachers’ emotions and agency as central to inclusive practice (Zembylas, 2007; Priestley, Biesta, & Robinson, 2015), these dimensions are often framed as individual or dispositional attributes rather than as governance-mediated democratic capacities. This paper advances the concept of democratic professionalism, arguing that teacher agency is structurally conditioned by institutional legitimacy (Evetts, 2009), relational trust and professional capital (Hargreaves & Fullan, 2012), and broader political-economic contexts that shape the public purposes of education (Gramsci, 1971).

Teachers may be understood, in Gramscian terms, as public intellectual actors situated within civil society whose work mediates between state reform agendas and lived community realities. Their ability to exercise democratic agency depends not only on technical competence but on emotionally sustainable professional environments that reinforce dignity, belonging, and relational accountability. From this perspective, teachers’ emotions constitute part of the affective infrastructure through which democratic commitments are sustained, negotiated, or weakened.

Drawing on scholarship in social-emotional learning (Elmeski & Bentahar, 2024), professional collaboration (Romiti, Florek, & Elmeski, 2025), and systems thinking in educational leadership (Elmeski, 2021), the paper develops a three-level analytical framework. At the micro level, teachers’ social-emotional competencies and sense of professional dignity shape their engagement with inclusion as a civic practice. At the meso level, relational governance—collaborative cultures, shared norms, and distributed expertise—mediates the translation of policy into practice. At the macro level, governance coherence determines whether reform discourse, accountability mechanisms, and institutional supports align in ways that enable agency rather than produce compliance.

The urgency of this analysis emerges from reform contexts where education is central to renegotiating the social contract. In Morocco, large-scale reforms are unfolding amid persistent youth unemployment pressures and human capital challenges (World Bank, 2022), territorial inequalities in educational access and outcomes (OECD, 2018), and heightened expectations of institutional accountability articulated in Framework Law 51.17 and the New Development Model (Commission Spéciale sur le Modèle de Développement, 2021). In such political-economic conditions, education systems are tasked simultaneously with promoting inclusion, improving measurable outcomes, and restoring public trust. These pressures intensify the emotional terrain of teaching.

Rather than presenting a national case study, this contribution mobilizes reform dynamics as a comparative lens to illuminate structural tensions observable across systems confronting social fragmentation and institutional strain. The paper concludes by proposing indicators of democratic professional capacity that complement performance metrics with measures of relational trust, emotional sustainability, and perceived governance coherence. In doing so, it seeks to open dialogue between evaluation institutions, policy scholars, and teacher education programs committed to renewing democratic schooling through structurally supported professional agency.