Defending – Renewing – Re-imagining Democracy-as-Becoming. Research-Workshop Trilogy for the upcoming European Educational Research Association Conference (ECER) accepted
At the end of March this year, during our consortium meeting in Lisbon, a visit to a local school gave us insights into a lively school culture. During our visit, a young woman expressed her feeling that giving birth to a child in current times would not be an option.
In fact, we are facing many challenges: Democracy is in danger and must be defended. As we see on a global scale, democracy is at risk in parliaments and parties, societies and governments. Anti-democratic and right-wing forces are gaining power, and we are facing and feeling the need to cultivate democracy not only in people’s daily lives but also in our institutions and organisations.
In our AECED project, we address the educational practices of professionals and institutions as crucial potentials for democratisation and an experiential approach to democracy. How can educational institutions be supported to strengthen organisational and institutional democracy? How can teachers, educators, and professionals live democracy in their classrooms, teaching, and counselling practices? How can the patterns of organising cultivate and foster democracy-as-becoming? And how can they defend democracy, re-new their institutional and organisational settings and re-imagine democracy-as-becoming?
The AECED project wants to create a platform for critical thinking and learning, which might strengthen democratic practices at a micro and meso-level. It might support re-imagining education for democracy. It might support organizational, institutional, and policy learning, and foster impactful change.
Against an apolitical and merely instrumentalist perspective, aesthetic and embodied learning, participatory multi-stakeholder approaches, and bottom-up approaches to organisational learning can contribute to ‘citizenship-as-practice’. From an organisational education perspective, we see organisational citizenship as a potential for the future and search for institutional openings toward democratic learning in organizations, of organizations, or between organizations. Grounded in an embodiment research and intervention approach, we refer to explicitly embodied learning settings and to intersectional dimensions of embodied learning in this broad inter- and transnational field of democracy and citizenship education. Democracy-as-becoming for us is a matter of experience-based reflexivity and imagination in arts and embodied engagement.
In connecting to our two sister projects Critical Change Lab (CC-LAB) and DEMOCRAT, we will have opportunity to reflect on policy learning in the next upcoming ECER conference. In addition, we just have been accepted for a trilogy of research workshops, which will take place in Belgrade in the second week of September 2025. We are very much looking forward to these research workshops, as we hope to engage in participatory, inter-project exchange and policy recommendations, which will align the strategies of the three sister projects. We will reflect on democratic organisational development, on experiencing democracy and democratisation of the classroom, the educational contexts, the institutional setting of learning, social and educational innovations, and multilayer policy learning.
As all of our projects are working with a Participatory Action Research (PAR) approach, we have all been creating comparative case studies and integrating several layers and dimensions. We have been creating products, tools, and processes that can support education for democracy, democratisation, and democracy learning. In all of our projects, institutional and policy learning has a role to play: The Horizon 2020 project Critical Change LAB has developed a self-assessment tool to analyse educational institutions regarding their cultural democratic practice. The Horizon 2020 DEMOCRAT project has been working with schools, teachers, authorities, and the Council of Europe. The competence framework for democratic education can be scaled up and expanded from a niche audience to broader communities from a multi-layer governance perspective. The Horizon 2020 AECED project is developing frameworks and guides for professional and organisational learning across all institutionalised educational phases of formal education.
So, there will be much to discover in our reflexive and cocreational trilogy, where we wish to contribute to defending, re-newing and re-imagining democracy-as-becoming in our educational institutional contexts.
Blog written by Prof. Dr. Susanne Maria Weber, Philipps University of Marburg
#Education4Democracy