Conference Program

Inspired by the principles of Educational Commons (De Lissovoy, 2011; Pechtelidis, 2020), this research explores the evolving role of libraries in fostering learning environments that extend beyond the traditional confines of the school. It’s an opportunity for us to think about Education not only within schools, but also in other places where children can learn, experiment, contribute and share. Libraries are increasingly becoming vital social hubs and incubators for innovation, offering spaces for children and young people to learn, experiment, contribute, and share. This proposal investigates how these libraries are echoing the ideals of an Educational Commons, creating opportunities for participatory learning and community engagement.

This proposal will focus on two cases in France where libraries are experimenting innovative approaches related to educational commons. Their experiments contribute to the transformation of libraries as a social hub, further from their traditional missions:

• With eXperium, Lilliad (Lille University Learning Center) is performing an important scientific mediation (more than 10 000 children were concerned) and transforming the way students are practising the library.

• From its start, the Petite Bibliothèque Ronde is about children's literature and how to create a space for them. By actively involving artists and with people under constraints (children/people in detention facilities), the library is working on key concepts like democracy, inclusion and access to reading.

Libraries are deeply related to their territory meaning that this place could be an opportunity to create space where the initial “doing things together” also means creating spaces to rediscover this “common moral and political socialization of all children and young people.”(Laval, 2006) In this perspective, we are working on a “learning territory” (Gwiazdzinski & Cholat, 2019) where education performs within and outside School.

At a time of democratic backsliding, widening inequalities, and growing barriers to knowledge access, public institutions face the challenge of creating environments where participation and shared responsibility are experienced rather than proclaimed. This communication asks: how can public libraries function as commons-based infrastructures that embed democracy in everyday learning practices?

The analysis draws on findings from the European Union Erasmus + funded project LibCommon (Universities and Libraries as Commons-Based Innovative Environments for Learning, Civic Engagement and Democracy). Methodologically, the communication presents a qualitative case study from the Catalan context, combining semi-structured interviews with cultural policy experts and field visits to two contrasting library models: the Biblioteca Gabriel García Márquez in Barcelona and the Bibliobuses of the Xarxa de Biblioteques Municipals de Barcelona.

The comparative approach enables an examination of how commons-based principles are operationalised across fixed and mobile infrastructures. The Biblioteca Gabriel García Márquez exemplifies institutional openness through participatory and inclusive design. Initiatives such as Ràdio Maconda, a professional community radio studio enabling collective cultural production, demonstrate how libraries can redistribute cultural authority, lower symbolic barriers, and foster co-creation. Through project-based methodologies supported by professional equipment and staff facilitation, users create podcasts and radio programmes on cultural, social and literary topics. The studio collaborates with schools and local groups, hosting interviews, book-club productions and youth-led projects. This initiative expands literacy beyond traditional format, strengthens media literacy and fosters civic engagement, transforming the library into a platform for collective expression.Radio Maconda also increases participation among diverse groups and reinforce the library’s role as an inclusive, socially responsive cultural hub.

The Bibliobús model, by contrast, embodies territorial inclusivity by extending professional library services to small and rural municipalities lacking permanent infrastructure. Bibliobus are mobile library services operating in the province of Barcelona since 1995. They travel along pre-established routes to serve 152 small and rural municipalities, typically with populations with less than 3,000 inhabitants. Many of these towns lack the resources to maintain a permanent library. As a travelling cultural hub, it reduces geographic and economic inequalities while sustaining local participation through coordinated activities with schools and community actors.

Taken together, the cases reveal two interconnected dimensions of democratic culture: ensuring that institutions are open to diverse publics and actively reaching those otherwise excluded. That is, that public libraries understood as common goods can become “Palaces for the people” (Klinenberg, 2019). However, the findings also highlight a deeper governance question: democracy in libraries is not secured solely through universal access, but through participation in defining norms, priorities, and collective meanings. The public value of commons libraries therefore lies in their capacity to respond to collective needs, reduce social and cultural inequalities, and sustain shared civic spaces where differences are negotiated rather than segregated. That is, rather than simply providing access or support, libraries are called upon to cultivate commons-based infrastructures based on values of shared governance, co-creation, mutual care, and democratic participation. By conceptualising libraries as commons-based civic infrastructures, this research contributes to debates on public institutions, inequality, and everyday democracy

This study re-envisions the role of public school through the Pedagogy of the Commons approach (De Lissovoy, 2011; Pechtelidis, 2023; Pechtelidis et al. 2023). At its core lies the notion of conviviality, the art of coexisting in equality and reciprocal interdependence (Illich, 1973; Les Convivialistes, 2014; Bollier & Helfrich, 2019). The research sought out to explore whether, and to what extent, counter-hegemonic pedagogical practices and forms of commoning can unfold within public education, and how schools may function as sites that host such practices without abandoning their institutional character. Adopting a critical action-research design (Kemmis et al., 2014), nine sixth-grade primary school students participated in an extracurricular program where they co-designed Educational Escape Rooms. This collective endeavor fostered practices of co-creation, peer learning, and shared decision making. Data, collected through participant observation, reflective focus groups, a field diary, and pedagogical artefacts, were thematically analyzed (Braun & Clarke, 2006). Findings reveal the potential of convivial commoning as a pedagogical process within public school. Students cultivated collectivity, while conflicts served as opportunities for preserving and strengthening relationships, thereby establishing a positive and engaging atmosphere.

This presentation examines educational commons as an alternative pedagogical and political paradigm that reconfigures learning as a collective, relational, experimental, and democratic process. Challenging individualized, competitive, and market-oriented models of education, it conceptualizes education not as a private good but as a common good and a shared social practice grounded in processes of commoning. Educational commons extend beyond the notion of shared resources to encompass dynamic practices through which communities collectively govern knowledge and learning, spaces, and social relations. Through horizontal decision-making, shared responsibility, and co-creation of knowledge, educational environments are transformed into sites of democratic experimentation, where learning becomes affective, collaborative, and socially embedded.

The presentation highlights the significant contribution of the Laboratory of Sociology of Education at the University of Thessaly in advancing the study of educational commons both theoretically and empirically. Drawing on European and national research projects, the Laboratory has systematically explored how practices of commoning emerge within schools, youth spaces, and cultural institutions such as museums and libraries. These projects investigate children’s and young people’s participation in collective governance, the potential of collaborative structures to address educational inequalities, and the ways institutional cultures can shift toward more inclusive and democratic forms.

Central to the presentation is the Libcommons project, which serves as the main empirical case study. Libcommons explores how public, school, and academic libraries can function as commons-based educational infrastructures, repositioning them from passive repositories of knowledge to active hubs of collaborative learning and democratic participation. By fostering structured partnerships between higher education institutions and libraries, the project bridges formal and non-formal education and promotes innovative pedagogical practices. Within this framework, libraries are reimagined as living ecosystems in which students, educators, librarians, and local community actors co-design learning activities, co-produce knowledge, negotiate shared norms, and cultivate collective stewardship. This approach supports the development of key competencies for contemporary societies, including civic engagement, participatory citizenship, intercultural dialogue, critical thinking, digital literacy, and lifelong learning.

At the same time, the presentation critically engages with the tensions between grassroots commons-based initiatives and macro-level educational policies. By situating Libcommons within national and European policy frameworks, and drawing from the theories of hegemony and post-hegemony, it examines how dominant policy discourses both enable and constrain the scaling of commoning practices. This micro-macro perspective allows for a nuanced discussion of the conditions under which educational commons can be sustained, institutionalized, or transformed without losing their participatory ethos.

Drawing on insights from childhood and youth studies, the presentation foregrounds children and young people as present political subjects rather than future citizens. In commons-based educational environments, participation moves beyond tokenistic inclusion toward shared authority and collective responsibility, fostering democratic subjectivities grounded in collaboration, mutual recognition, and care.

Overall, the presentation argues that educational commons operate as laboratories of democracy, where everyday practices of togetherness generate new imaginaries of learning, citizenship, and institutional life. By combining theoretical reflection with empirical evidence from Libcommons and related projects, it contributes to broader debates on how local practices of commoning can be connected to processes of systemic educational transformation.

One of the main contemporary issues in education is facilitating every child to develop democratic citizenship, as it is important to have an active participation in decision making based on its maturity and interest in matters of its everyday experience (Correia et al., 2022; Pechtelidis, 2018). The importance of such participation and acquisition of democratic values is underscored in National Constitutions and Educational Curricula in alignment with the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Participatory and democratic pedagogy is based on the notion of the “child as a citizen of today” supporting the idea that children can have a role in the development of community practices through not only becoming visible, but also being involved in decision-making processes.

Despite the rising interest in young children as active citizens, their participation in local authorities’ decisions is still limited. This paper presents an educational program, implemented in several early childhood educational settings in Alexandroupolis, Greece, as part of the teacher students’ internship program in the 4^th year of their studies in the Department of Educational Studies in Early Childhood, at Democritus University of Thrace. The intervention was based on an educational project-based scenario, which student teachers developed with their academic mentors and revised taking into account kindergarten teachers’ input and children’s ideas. Children were facilitated to be actively engaged in the life of their community, proposing ways to enrich the municipality’s carnival celebrations for the following year. Their proposals were sent to the mayor for consideration. This way, children embodied an alternative discourse of their agency, that constructing them as active, competent, informed and interested citizens. Being engaged in a lived practice of democratic participation within shared spaces of togetherness, they enacted democratic practices and were empowered to feel that they could make a difference to their community. The presentation concludes with suggestions regarding more inclusive interactions between children and local governing bodies.

The present contribution suggests heritage education as a field for promoting citizenship practices among children. It highlights its potential to cultivate their awareness as social and cultural actors capable of generating change within their everyday environments, while encouraging their active participation in and engagement to the common good. In its most recent conceptualization, heritage education is understood as a participatory process, oriented toward the co-construction of knowledge about what is recognized as heritage, rather than the mere transmission of information (Del Gobbo et al., 2018; De Nicola & Zuccoli, 2016). Within this framework, heritage is no longer conceived as a set of fixed assets, but as a social and cultural process, continuously transformed and re-signified (Smith, 2006), shaped by the interplay between past, present, and future. Accordingly, heritage is not a self-evident given; rather, it acquires meaning in relation to the futures that are imagined and negotiated (Harrison et al., 2023). Also, international agendas (UNESCO 2003; CoE, 2005) attach central relevance to the role of society in identifying, meaning-making, and care for heritage, sustaining a progressive democratization in this field (Cirino, 2017). However, children’s voices regarding heritage remain significantly under-researched (Ginzarly & Srour, 2021; Smith, 2013), highlighting the need to explore their relationship with it. From a relational and intergenerational perspective (Moran-Ellis, 2021; Eßer et al., 2016), children are understood as competent social actors who actively participate in the co-construction of heritage in dialogue with adults (Sebastiano et al., 2025).

Based on these considerations, this contribution presents an interdisciplinary study that combines educational and design research, with the aim of gaining a deeper understanding of how children reflect and co-construct heritage. The methodological framework adopted is Educational Design-Based Research (van den Akker et al., 2006, McKenney & Reeves, 2012), which conceptualizes research objects as epistemic, processual, and unfinished, requiring iterative processes of shared exploration and reflection to co-construct knowledge. This perspective resonates with the understanding of heritage as a collective and socially situated phenomenon, continuously shaped through social practices between subjects as well as between subject and material (Reckwitz, 2003).

The ongoing empirical study, conducted in shape-by diversity area, within non-formal educational settings, involves children aged 8-12 in Real-World Labs (Parodi et al., 2023). These are conceived as creative and dialogic environments, where participants are engaged as active actors. Through material-based stimuli, introduced to render the otherwise abstract concept of heritage more accessible and tangible, children are invited to explore, negotiate, and co-construct their understandings of heritage in relation to shared individual and collective experiences. From this perspective, RWLs are framed as transformative and democratic spaces where heritage becomes a means to reflect on what is recognized as meaningful in the present, identify common goods, imagine possible futures, and experiment with practices of care (Sebastiano, 2025).

By including children’s perspectives within processes of heritage co-construction, this contribution proposes an understanding of heritage education as a democratic, participatory, and future-oriented practice, capable of nurturing situated forms of participation and citizenship in increasingly complex socio-cultural contexts characterized by superdiversity (Vertovec, 2023).

This contribution examines an attempt to sustain pedagogical innovation through the deliberate integration of two complementary learning experiences situated at the intersection of formal and non-formal education in Reggio Emilia, Italy: the Delivery Museum (DM) and Scuola Diffusa (SD), a form of Widespread Education.

Research conducted by the Centro di Ricerca su Insegnanti ed Innovazione Didattica (CERIID) at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia has documented the effectiveness of out-of-school learning experiences in enhancing student motivation, promoting meaningful learning, supporting inclusion and democratic participation to learning, and fostering students' metacognitive awareness. However, a recurring challenge remains: the effects of such experiences tend to fade once students return to the routines of school life, and teachers find it difficult to sustain more participatory and democratic pedagogical approaches in classroom settings.

In December 2025, Reggio Emilia Civic Museums brought thirty objects to a primary school (DM), creating a freely accessible space in which classes were invited to organise learning activities around museum artefacts and to reflect on curatorial practices. In January 2026, one class subsequently participated in SD — organised by Officina Educativa, the educational department of the Municipality of Reggio Emilia — spending a week immersed in an architecture exhibition, engaging in observation, inquiry, and collaborative reflection alongside teachers and educators through processes of co-researching, co-designing, and co-teaching.

The educators from the Museum and Officina Educativa, the classroom teachers, and a CERIID researcher collectively designed the integration of the two experiences. To make the connection explicit for students, a mosaic from DM was brought into the SD exhibition space. Adults anticipated that students would recognise both experiences as inquiry-based, and anticipated reflection on "design" as a shared process across contexts.

Following SD, the researcher conducted two focus groups with students, investigating their perceptions of learning, peer relationships, and metacognitive strategies. The photovoice methodology was employed to explore students' representations of the wonder of learning, the beauty of knowing, the challenges of learning, and the strength of collaborative inquiry.

Results indicate that students recognised skills developed in DM — observation, inquiry, collaborative problem-solving — as directly transferable to SD. Both image sets were drawn upon in the photovoice activity, confirming the meaningfulness of each context. Notably, certain concepts, such as the beauty of knowing, were more frequently represented through DM imagery. Students demonstrated an emerging capacity to identify and articulate strategies for enhancing their own understanding. Moreover, they recognized the power of learning in groups, with both adults and peers. Exchanging ideas, changing points of view, asking and answering questions collectively, emerged as ways not only to enhance understanding and learning, but also to discover the marvel of knowledge and buster motivation for all.

For teachers, the collaborative design of research instruments deepened their understanding of students' learning processes and enriched their observational practices. Reflective dialogue among all adult participants generated renewed pedagogical insight into how teaching methodologies might be transformed to foster more participatory and democratic approaches to learning.