Conference Program

This paper examines transnational education as a micro-space of democracy within contexts of political transition, uncertainty and systemic educational reform. Drawing on a reflexive, practice-based case study of a UK-Uzbekistan university partnership, it explores how democratic participation and agency are materially produced through curriculum co-design, inclusive pedagogy, and the everyday organisation of access, support, academic freedom and safe spaces within a multilingual, multicultural, non-western institutional context (Council of Europe, 2025; QAA, 2023; Collins, 2019). Rather than treating democracy as an assumed outcome of access, the paper conceptualises micro-democracy as a routine intentional alignment with democratic values, enacted across the full student and institutional lifecycle (Vazquez Garcia et al., 2025; Demirbolat, n.d.).

Uzbekistan’s 2030 reform agenda has strategically positioned widening participation as a central element of social cohesion and democratic renewal (Presidential Decree No. UP-158, 2023; Government of Uzbekistan, 2022). This followed decades of highly uneven access to higher education shaped by geographical, geopolitical, socioeconomic, and gender-based inequalities. These structural inequalities had historically constrained the capacity of higher education to foster participation, social mobility, and democratic engagement, particularly for students from rural regions and underprivileged backgrounds and for women in particular. In simple terms, education was not functioning as an enabler for social mobility but rather as an elite opportunity.

Against this backdrop, a partnership between a UK and an Uzbek university was established through the co-design of undergraduate and postgraduate programmes via a hands-on collaborative and participatory work that deliberately avoided “best practices” or a “pre-defined equilibrium”. The degree of unpredictability with regards to the outcome was embraced by all actors while the anchor was common: the creation of non-western, globally relevant decolonial curricula. The initiative was informed by the UK University’s purpose of creating a better society through education, underpinned by social justice, while supporting each individual and encouraging collective engagement. It was also closely aligned with the local context and national reform priorities, while remaining carefully contextualised to the contemporary Uzbek environment. Democratic participation, in this case, was materially produced through partnership and pedagogical intentionality of programme design, operating as a form of resistance to historically exclusionary higher education structures

This paper illustrates the ways in which transnational education can function as a democratic micro-space, a vehicle for social justice and transformative learning, through a holistic approach to inclusivity and democratic engagement for students and local academics (QAA, 2023; Council of Europe, 2025). It presents a context-sensitive anti-linear approach to transnational higher education practice showcasing resistance to past territorial inequality in access to higher education which was structurally aligned with a de facto stratification within nominally egalitarian systems. The paper contributes to debates on democracy and education, by theorising micro-democracy as relational practice produced through partnership, under conditions of change and constraint, rather than as an assumed outcome of access alone.

This paper examines the role of community educational centres as drivers of social innovation oriented towards educational justice, drawing on the case of "L'ABC del Quartiere" in Milan's San Siro district. Located in a context marked by segregation, educational poverty, and a high concentration of migrant populations (Grassi, 2022), the study investigates how proximity-based educational practices can address the structural inequalities that intersect in the lives of women and children. The theoretical framework adopts an intersectional perspective (Hill Collins & Bilge, 2020) to interpret the condition of mothers in San Siro. They stand at the crossroads of multiple discriminations: gender, as women navigating patriarchal structures; ethnic-religious identity, as Arab-Muslims in an Islamophobic society; housing and class, as residents of a ghettoized neighborhood; and legal status, as mothers of children born in Italy denied citizenship under ius sanguinis.Three perspectives are integrated. Social innovation (Moulaert & MacCallum, 2019) frames L'ABC as a laboratory for bottom-up collective action. Nancy Fraser's three-dimensional justice model (2008) is articulated in an intersectional manner: redistribution (combating educational poverty), recognition (valuing heritage languages), and representation (struggling for participatory parity despite formal exclusion). Paulo Freire's critical pedagogy (1971) conceives education as a practice of freedom, transforming mothers and children into co-constructors of the educational environment, while simultaneously, Community Service Learning (CSL) at L'ABC shapes the professional identity of education students (Zecca, 2024). Intertwined with participatory action research, CSL cultivates "transformative intellectuals" (Giroux, 1988), thus becoming a political dimension of pedagogical professions: a site of resistance against the systematic denial of citizenship. The research adopts a qualitative, participatory methodology: participant observation and research diaries analyzed through reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2021); semi-structured interviews with 16 mothers attending the L2 Italian course; and participatory focus groups with educators, teachers, and CSL students. Preliminary findings reveal four impacts. Redistributive: individualized tutoring produced 30% improvement in L2 Italian literacy (CILS certifications), reducing implicit school dropout. Recognition: valorization of Arabic disrupts children's linguistic invisibility, strengthening scholastic legitimacy (Zecca & Lefterov, 2025). For mothers, seeing their language valued counters social devaluation. Participation and citizenship: mothers' trust in institutions increased through co-presence (Sacerdote, Zecca, 2025). Yet the paradox of denied legal citizenship persists: they participate actively but remain excluded from formal politics. The centre becomes a space of substantive citizenship, where belonging is prefiguratively enacted. Mothers' voices become political acts of resistance. Social innovation and CSL as political practice: multi-agency collaboration configures an ecosystem of care (Zecca, Fredella & Cotza, 2024). CSL students develop border consciousness, learning to stand alongside those deprived of the right to have rights. Preliminary evidence from this ongoing experience suggests that L'ABC, anchored to an intersectional social justice framework, may offer a valuable model for recomposing the misalignment between school and territory. As a longitudinal study now in progress, the centre appears to function as a laboratory of democracy where pedagogical research is gradually transmuted into political practice, potentially advocating for full citizenship rights.

In contemporary university contexts, is it possible to conceive of a redistribution of spaces of power that positions students as intentional co-constructors of their own learning processes and of the organisation of knowledge? How might one move towards a co-design process, while rethinking its aims and possibilities?

At the conceptual level, this requires moving beyond the notion of devolution to the student (Brousseau, 1998). Devolution does not eliminate asymmetry, nor does it diminish the teacher’s power. The student is placed in a system that nonetheless remains conceived and organised by the teacher. What emerges is a partial and subordinate form of agency, one that allows room for action only within boundaries predefined and designed by others.

Due to cultural and organisational constraints, the contemporary higher education context remains strongly shaped by an asymmetrical relationship between teacher and student; nonetheless, micro-spaces of co-design exist and can attenuate the teacher’s authority and redistribute it more diffusely. In doing so, they make visible two epistemological horizons that we consider to be foundational and generative.

1) The evolution of design within architecture and engineering. A full understanding of people’s needs and aspirations can only be achieved by involving them in the design process, as they are the primary experts on their own lived experience. For this reason, actively involving people with lived experience from the earliest stages of the design process appears indispensable. This shift has marked a passage from user-centred design to co-design, insofar as designers are required to engage with users’ tacit knowledge and latent needs (Augsten & Gekeler, 2017; Örnekoğlu-Selçuk et alii, 2024).

When transposed into learning design, this perspective suggests rethinking design itself as a formative process, shifting it from something structured into something structuring. It can’t be reduced to a matter of starting from students’ needs or from a contextual diagnosis. Rather, it entails connecting and orchestrating the fragments of knowledge, experience, and action that students bring with them (Ozdemir & Clark, 2007).

2) The shift from devolution to interaction within an ecosystemic perspective. Within the ecosystem, transformative processes assume a central role, since transformation unfolds in a co-evolutionary and collaborative manner (Pentucci, 2021). Actors transform their world together and are, in turn, transformed by it, within a continuous flow that unfolds as a dynamic cycle of interactions between actors and environment (Stetsenko, 2008; 2017). Through these interactions, human, non-human, and digital agents intentionally enact a form of co-agency (Singh & Engeness, 2025) that is not subordinated to the power or intention of others, but emerges dialogically. This opens up micro-spaces of action and intentionality.

In order to explore how these horizons may emerge from practice, this contribution presents several micro-scenarios in which spaces of co-design are opened within university teaching. Through these examples, we discuss whether teaching can shift from devolution to interaction and shared power, recognising students as dialogic subjects and fostering the ecosystem’s emergence.

Physics as a discipline has been recognised as a “culture without culture” (1), perpetuating a “myth of neutrality” (2) that masks its unfolding within specific power structures and whose interests it serves, including colonial and militarised agendas (3). In physics teacher trajectories, this myth also depoliticises teaching by positioning physics as objective content to be transmitted rather than as a pedagogical and political practice (4). One assumption sustained by physics departments that reifies this culture is the teaching assumption (5): knowing physics is enough to teach it. This assumption dismisses pedagogical and cultural knowledge, elevates physics above other ways of knowing, and forecloses the possibilities under which physics might function as a democratising practice rather than as a site of disciplinary reproduction and cultural oppression.

We examine how this culture is reproduced across Chile, Cyprus, Italy, and the Netherlands through a comparative case study (6) at micro, meso, and macro levels. At the micro level, we draw on reflective narrative inquiry into the experiences that shaped our becoming as physics educators; at the meso level, we analyse the institutional cultures of physics teacher education; at the macro level, we consider the broader structures and circulating norms that shape local practices. To interpret these dynamics, we draw on Bernstein’s concepts of classification and framing (7), using them to analyse how institutional boundaries and pedagogical control relations reproduce the myth of neutrality across contexts.

We identified similar experiences at the micro level despite significant differences in how control mechanisms operate. At the meso level, strong classification appears in the insulation of teacher preparation within physics departments, physically and intellectually separated from pedagogical expertise. This separation keeps physics as detached from sociopolitical concerns. Strong framing appears through the teaching assumption: what future teachers learn is largely defined by physics content; how they learn is organised through disciplinary hierarchies that privilege abstraction over contextual and human implications; and when they learn to teach is often deferred until after content mastery. At the macro level, these patterns are reinforced by transnational curricula that present physics as culturally neutral and disconnected from local problems (8). By surfacing these patterns across levels, we contest the myth of neutrality that shields physics education from cultural critique.

The participants’ trajectories however show that spaces are not fully closed and point to costly cracks in this disciplinary culture, often emerging through professional and personal crises, conflict with the norms of physics, and efforts to construct alternative relations to teaching the discipline (9). These trajectories show how possibilities for resistance may emerge through friction with the culture of the discipline, enabling physics education to act its liberatory power (10) and for us, at times, resulting in joining collectives to think and enact physics otherwise.

We argue that physics education must be understood as education in its own right, not as a subdiscipline of physics. Only then can physics teacher education become a space for pedagogical judgment, critical inquiry, and democratic practice, rather than the reproduction of disciplinary neutrality.

In response to the question posed by the title of this panel, this contribution argues that “being political” in the context of higher education may also mean designing teaching practices that enable students to resist any act of defining themselves and the world that is produced without their own words. This argument draws on Mikhail Bakhtin (1984) writing, particularly in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, where he shows how Dostoevskian characters resist the author’s defining act and retain the “last word” about themselves. This does not depend solely on the character of the hero, but on the author’s posture, which refrains from confining the character within a definitive description and leaves open the space of their becoming. Rather than constructing a character, the author shapes the character’s words about themselves and about the world.
In the context of teaching specifically, Bakhtin (1981) further emphasizes that only “internally persuasive discourse”, and not authoritative ones, is capable of awakening autonomous thought and enabling the generation of new responsive discourse. It is within this interaction of words, viewpoints and interpretations that Bakhtin’s concept of the “subject’s ideological becoming” takes shape: the process through which each person develops their own way of seeing the world.
From this perspective, the contribution presents and discusses some examples of teaching practices and the analysis of materials developed within university and postgraduate training programmes dedicated to special education for inclusion. The view of inclusive education as a practice that requires the development of a posture capable of questioning otherness rather than confining it within predefined definitions, and of challenging prêt-à-porter thinking in order to build autonomous thought, reinforces the relevance of a Bakhtinian perspective (Manno 2016; 2021).
The teaching practices described often begin with students’ work, such as short texts, metaphors and images, including those generated by artificial intelligence. Since these are not merely expressive elements but sites where cultural patterns that orient action sediment, they can become working materials for activating processes of thinking and critical inquiry into the representations, often implicit, through which we interpret the world, as well as into our own thinking processes.
The aim of these practices is to make possible a form of resistance to predefined definitions and stereotypes while fostering the search for new forms of thought and action. This occurs with the awareness that every new cultural form, in the absence of reflective thinking capable of re-examining it (Dewey 1997; Lipman 2003), always carries the potential to become a stereotype itself. The resistance that these practices seek to activate corresponds to a form of opposition that, in Bakhtinian terms, is dialogic rather than conflictual, insofar as it coincides with the possibility of responding on the basis of one’s own autonomous thought, questioning the representations through which we interpret the world and developing one’s own words in response to the word of others.