Educational Common Spaces. Passing through enclosures and reversing inequalities

SMOOTH intends to introduce the emergent paradigm of the ‘commons’ as an alternative value and action system in the field of education for children and young people.

The project critically draws out the implications of the commons for refiguring education and for social change in general, on a footing of equality, sharing, participation, togetherness, caring and freedom.

The project will address social inclusion according to the ‘educational commons’, which we want to study, if they can operate as a catalyst for reversing inequalities, through a variety of methods such as pedagogical documentation, pedagogy of active listening, ethnography, discourse analysis.In particular, it proposes an innovative action research program with and by children to: a. reverse inequalities faced by children from vulnerable social groups; b. strengthen inter-cultural and inter-generational dialogue and social integration;c. develop vital social and personal skills for the children and adults; d. create smooth spaces of democratic citizenship and experimentation with new ways of thinking and doing on the basis of equality, collaboration, collective creativity, sharing and caring; e. build and foster community through differences.Universities, research labs, municipalities, NGOs, museums, and youth organizations, in different countries, will work interdisciplinary and interculturally together to achieve the above aims from the point of view of educational commons.

Specifically, various case studies will be conducted in educational premises to reverse the existing inequalities and achieve an active social exclusion for vulnerable children and youth.

In short, a cross-cutting, cross-disciplinary analysis about the role of educational commons must be seen as crucial to provide policymakers new, innovative and more efficient tools for proposing new policies to better engage children and adults in developing a more secure and resilient economic, political and social model of Europe.