Conference Program

Pedagogue and philosopher John Dewey defined democracy as more than a societal system where citizens make choices and express their opinion (Dewey 1916). He defined democracy in terms of an ongoing co-construction of a communicative culture, “a way of life”, in education and society (Dewey 1939). In an important reading of Dewey's work, James Carey (1989) draws out the shared root of the words common, community, and communication: persons live in community by virtue of what they hold in common, and communication is the process by which they come to hold things in common. The task of early childhood education and care (ECEC) is thus to create a way of life that accommodates the ongoing, communicative co-construction of common culture, knowledge, and values across generations.

To promote such a way of life in ECEC today is challenging. Across large parts of the world, ECEC is since long subject to a forceful commodification that erodes democracy, equity and inclusion in education (Roberts-Holmes & Moss 2021; Vandenbroeck, Lehrer & Mitchell 2024). In Sweden, these values are now framed as problems to be solved through children's early acquisition of the national language – a logic that reduces communication to transmission, education to instrumental teaching of cognitive linguistic skills, and that, remarkably, lacks scientific grounding and risks undermining the very democratic, equitable and inclusive practices it claims to promote (Lecusay, Olsson & Nilsson, in press; Olsson, Lecusay & Dalsgaard 2023).

To counter this, we draw on an on-going government-funded project designed to study how children’s narratives and commons may be stimulated in what we call Aesthetic Literacy Events (ALEs) – playful explorations of language that activate both body and mind and that carry the potential of enhancing both children’s cognitive language-development and more equitable and inclusive education (Olsson, Lecusay & Dalsgaard 2023). We focus on one of the project’s constituent studies concerning the development and field-testing of a philosophical-pedagogical theory of ALEs. This includes educational commons theory (Pechtelidis & Kioupkiolis 2020; Cappello et al. 2024; Olsson, Lecusay & Nilsson 2024), philosophical perspectives on language and social formation (Bergson 1896/1988; Deleuze & Guattari 2004) as well as cultural-psychological theories of children’s narratives (Bruner 1991, Nelson 1996). These theoretical perspectives, we argue, make it possible to understand even the youngest children – toddlers’ – development of narratives and creation of commons as intertwined and co-emergent processes that may be stimulated in ALEs.

We make this case through examples from fieldwork in Swedish preschools where we engaged with toddlers’ everyday activities as a way of field-testing and refining our developing theoretical framework. Through vignettes of a group clay activity and a moment of playful, humorous interaction, we show how toddlers’ narrative activity and creation of commons constitute moments in which culture, knowledge, and values are communicated and co-constructed. This takes place in preschools that through including elements of ALEs in their daily activities have managed to create a way of life that may constitute a space of togetherness in which democracy is not taught but lived.

European policies often frame urban public spaces as key sites for political and social development (European Commission, 2025). Space – and cities more specifically – it is argued, have become increasingly important to how we live, how economies work and how power functions. Furthermore, recent policy and theory-based frameworks on Adult Learning and Education (ALE) recognise citizenship education and civic participation as core dimensions of lifelong learning (UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning, 2022; UNESCO, 2021). Urban space thus emerges as an environment for informal learning that is practical, embodied, and relational (Grummell, 2010; Livingstone, 2001, 1999). From this perspective, learning takes place, that means it always happens “in location” (Colley, Hodkinson, & Malcolm, 2003; Lave & Wenger, 1991), even beyond formal educational circuits and settings. Participatory-oriented theories in adult education further suggest that informal learning is inseparable from a sense of belonging. To learn entails being part of, becoming a legitimate participant and member, while belonging itself requires to learn norms, values, identities related to the context to which we belong (Lave & Wenger, 1991). However, according to a critical perspective space is never neutral, but rather an entagled network of historical, cultural and social relationships (Massey, 2005): understanding space therefore requires critically questioning how it is represented, who has access to it, and who holds the power to construct discourses and thus to construct knowledge about it.

Urban regeneration processes provide a particularly revealing key case in which to examine these dynamics, as they actively reshape the material, symbolic and normative conditions of (public) space. The contemporary phenomenon of regeneration is frequently framed in policy discourses as a participatory and inclusive process of spatial transformation, involving various actors in a multilevel engagement, fostering civic and democratic education. Yet experiences of belonging and legitimacy are unevenly distributed, and inclusion and participation often remain rhetorical (Barron, 2022; Trawalter et al., 2021; Fincher et al., 2014). My research aims to investigate the conditions under which belonging, or a sense of distance or alienation, is learnt and reconfigured in public spaces undergoing urban regeneration, and how this shapes perceptions to be part of, or marginal to, collective urban life.

The research is based on an in-depth interpretative case study (Yin, 2018; Merriam, 1989) combining ethnographic observation, walking interviews and focus groups with differently positioned participants involved in a regeneration process in a medium-sized city in northern Italy. Initial findings highlight a number of tensions: between the perceived openness of the space and its actual accessibility, between civic imaginaries of public space and forms of private management, and between rhetoric and effective participation in public affairs, resulting in the perception of limited influence and disengagement.

By analysing belonging as a form of informal learning embedded in spatial experience and transformation, this research contributes to rethinking urban regeneration as a public pedagogy (Biesta, 2012). In this sense, it becomes a formative setting in which to develop a language of critique and possibility and where dispositions towards participation and civic agency can be encouraged-learnt or discouraged-taught.

Bourdieu's theoretical perspective has almost always been employed to interpret the processes that reproduce inequalities. This contribution, however, aims to explore the possibility of applying the Bourdieusian model to the analysis of transformation processes, situating it within the paradigm of education as a common good (Laval and Vergne, 2021). In literature, the paradigm of education as a common good is understood as a process that redefines the educational experience, structuring itself through participatory and co-design practices that enhance subjectivization. The aim of this paper is to understand how practices of "educational commons" can foster youth activism (Conner et al. 2024) and foster individual and community change in rural areas affected by depopulation and community fragmentation. Using the categories of field, habitus, and cultural capital, we analyze how the transformation of the educational model produces a reconfiguration of the educational field through the attempt to subvert the rules of the game and the dominant doxa. This process involves a restructuring of young people's habits, challenging the hierarchies of epistemic and symbolic power and the vested interests of dominant social groups. This implies a shift in their positions as legitimate agents of knowledge capable of interpreting, producing, and disseminating processes of change.
The study applies this theoretical framework to a revealing case study of a school located in a rural community in southern Italy (Giardiello and Capobianco, 2026).
The research, based on a qualitative approach, analyzed the film club project using unstructured interviews with the teacher who conceived the project and with families, and focus groups with students. The results show that education as a common good can not only be a transformative tool, redefining young people's capital and habits, but also allows us to observe the emergence of forms of resistance stemming from an adult-centric culture and limitations related to the difficulties in creating synergistic and non-self-referential networks among community stakeholders.

Democracy presupposes the recognition of others and participation in the decision-making and management processes of social life. For this to be achieved, intention in these directions and the concrete possibility of its occurrence are necessary.

Recognition of others is closely linked to cultural awareness, ethical solidarity, ongoing study, and an organic educational focus on these presuppositions.

Democratic participation refers to the involvement of the individual in their physical and spiritual reality. The democratic process therefore unfolds on two levels: the spiritual and the material-physical; these two levels intersect in continuous meaningful interactions.

Can it therefore be thought that learning democracy is, or should be, limited to a specific context? Rather, since it is a learning process that extends well beyond the time of "compulsory education", it requires methods, times, and places that can encompass the complexity of reality.

Transcending the narrow confines of formal education is an automatic consequence of this concept. Informal and non-formal learning thus come into play (Vezzola, 2020).

This new paradigm deconstructs the categories of learning times and life, and the places where they occur (Leali 2025).

The places themselves, both material and immaterial, are open to an educational-planning interpretation and use that positions them as providers of (democratic) meaning (Rossi, 2018).

The paper aims to investigate the adequacy of contemporary "material and immaterial spaces" within the context of the democratic evolution of societies (Augé, 2009).
At the same time, it will be illustrated how unschooling seams to be more suitable than others to develop the democratic presuppositions and the opportunities that informal and non-formal learning and “spaces of commons” can offer learners.

Schools as Infrastructures for Community Commoning: Participation, shared spaces and community development in Norwegian municipalities

Educational research increasingly explores the idea of the commons as a way of understanding collective responsibility for learning, knowledge and democratic life. Yet less attention has been paid to how practices of “commoning” may emerge around schools as part of broader community development processes. Commoning is understood here as collective practices through which communities organise, maintain and govern shared resources and social relations (McGinnis & Ostrom, 2014). In the cases explored here, young students identify resources in their neighbourhoods and invite residents to participate in activities, collaboration, and collective stewardship of emerging community spaces. The paper asks under what conditions school-based participation processes led by children and youth can develop into collective practices resembling commoning in local communities.

The study draws on collaborative research with Norwegian municipalities that have experimented with asset-based community development (ABCD) (Kretzmann & McKnight, 1993) approaches to strengthen child and youth participation in local communities (Agdal et al., 2019). Through participatory action research and long-term collaboration between researchers and municipal practitioners, the study analyses a set of initiatives where school pupils and youth groups engaged in identifying local resources, initiating activities, and mobilising residents around community projects.

The findings suggest that school-based participation processes can sometimes evolve into collective practices resembling commoning, where local actors jointly organise activities, develop meeting places, and take shared responsibility for maintaining community initiatives. Young people not only participated in decision-making but also mobilised peers and adults, organised activities, and contributed to the development of meeting places and shared initiatives in their neighbourhoods, bridging activities in and around the schools.

However, the cases also demonstrate that such processes are fragile and uneven. Sustained collective practices were more likely to emerge when three conditions converged: mobilization led by young people, connector roles and facilitation within municipal organisations, and access to accessible spaces where networks could develop through discussions and activities over time.

Schools and other public facilities often functioned as initial infrastructures that enabled these practices to develop. These conditions enabled the gradual formation of communities of practice around shared initiatives, a key feature of commoning processes.

The paper contributes to discussions on commons and education by highlighting how school-centred participation may extend into neighbourhood contexts and support emerging practices of commoning, linking educational participation with broader processes of democratic community development.

The cases also speak to broader debates on the drivers and constraints of commoning. While some perspectives emphasise commoning as emerging primarily outside or in opposition to formal institutions, others explore how institutional arrangements may support commons-based practices. The Norwegian cases suggest that in welfare-state contexts, public infrastructures and facilitative municipal roles may act not only as potential constraints but also as enabling conditions for children and youth-driven collective practices and emerging forms of commoning.

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).