Conference Agenda
Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available).
Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 19th Aug 2026, 21:28:02 EET
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Daily Overview |
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03 SES 07 B: AI Literacy and Curriculum: Design, Ethics and Consumer Perspectives
Research Workshop | ||
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03. Curriculum Innovation
Research Workshop Refusing to let Democracy Go: (How) Can we Renew Democratic Citizenship Education Curricula? 1: University of Manchester, United Kingdom; 2: Lund University; 3: Vilnius University; 4: University of Helsinki Presenting Author:This workshop seeks to renew curricular narratives for democratic citizenship education. The starting point is the understanding that democracy and democratic citizenship education are in crisis. In the face of numerous technological, geo-political, socio-economic, and climate changes, democracy no longer generates hope for a better future (Runciman, 2018). Alongside, it has become apparent that, rather than an ethical solution for all problems, democratic forms of government have repeatedly contributed toprocesses of coloniality, capitalism, and patriarchy (da Costa, 2024). Meanwhile, the role of education in democratising societies has been questioned, considering the undemocratic nature of schooling and other forms of education (Merry, 2020), as well as the very limited impact of current education in addressing the aforementioned challenges (Sant, 2021). Against this background, some democratic policymakers and scholars have argued for the need to protect the curricular aspiration of educating democratic citizens (e.g., CoE, 2018; Veugelers, 2024), whilst others have started to suggest the need to ‘refuse’ to engage with democratic citizenship education as we know it (e.g., Zembylas, 2022; Webb & Mikulan, 2022). This workshop is theoretically underpinned by Bonnie Honig’s (2021) democratic conceptualisation of refusal. Following Honig (2021), the urgency of our times demands we do things differently. As such, we agree with Zembylas (2022) and Webb and Mikulan (2023) that it is important that educators can ‘refuse’ to acritically engage with democratic citizenship education, question its desirability, take a break from what we currently do, look elsewhere, and try ‘new’ things. For our purposes here, we understand that educators can think ‘out of the box’ in relation to five curricular questions (Sant, 2021, forthcoming; also Taylor & Bovill, 2018):
In contrast with Zembylas (2022) and Webb and Mikulan (2023), however, we do not see ‘refusing’ as a synonymous with “letting it go”. As Honig (2021) notes, we feel that despite defeats and imperfections, democracy and democratic citizenship education push us “to return again and again, though we may fail” (p. 75) because in democracy, “we are all depending on each other” (p. 104). For us, democracy enables this relational attachment and in doing so, we feel attached to democracy. We understand that despite imperfections, democracy and democratic citizenship education are still worth pursuing. And to pursue democracy, imagining things differently or experimentation by a few is not enough. The possibility of real change requires a broader world-building practice of ‘fabulation’ “by way of action in concert” (Honig, 2021, p. 85). To illustrate the importance of fabulation, Honig (2021) discusses the book ‘Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments’, where the author, Saidiya Hartman, recovers the unknown stories of Black women and queers who individually refused to comply with white supremacist, patriarchal, and heteronormative regimes and joins them together as an act of pluralising, collectivising, and empowering otherwise one-off stories. For Honig (2021), alternatives in themselves do not bring change, unless they are articulated in narratives that enable survival and have “the power to guide action” (Honig, 2021, p. 103). For that, this workshop explicitly aims to enable novel curricular narratives for democratic citizenship education. After expanding our repertoire of curricular possibilities, the workshop seeks to answer the question, (how) can we imagine new narratives for a democratic citizenship education curriculum? Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources Used Methodologically, we draw upon speculative theories (i.e., Debaise, 2017; Stengers, 2010) and we conceptualise this workshop as a gathering event where proponents and participants gather “precisely because none [of us] has sufficient knowledge of how it relates to the issue at hand” (Bell, 2017, p. 191). Our curricular innovation workshop will be informed by organisers’ and participants’ knowledge, experiences, desires, and imaginations. The workshop will capitalise from a recent cross-disciplinary review of literature that seeks to expand conceptualisations of democratic education (e.g., Sant, 2021) as well as the contributions of participants in the planned ECER symposium ‘Democratic Citizenship Education in Crisis: Caring for Democracy in Uncertain Times’. To expand imagination, the session particularly welcomes participants from different education subfields to exchange their knowledge, practices, and previous innovations. Together, we will follow the speculative requirement of creativity (Debaise, 2017) to ultimately “invite the possibility of opening up a different way of thinking, living, and doing philosophically informed inquiry” (Mazzei, 2021, p. 556). Procedurally, we will follow four different steps to facilitate curricular creativity: Introduction to the workshop (20 minutes), including a presentation of the workshop’s aims and methodological underpinnings and procedures. Mapping of practices (30 minutes). Organised in work groups, participants will be provided with a set of paper notes -some of them empty and some of them containing texts, and visuals related to innovative democratic practices (from Sant, forthcoming). In each group, one of the workshop organisers will facilitate the activity and instruct participants to write in their paper notes any practice that they consider to be valuable for democratic citizenship education. The facilitator will then ask participants to discuss each of their paper notes and share their thoughts. Narrative building (20 minutes). In this step, participants will be advised to follow the requirement of creativity (Debaise, 2017). Participants will be requested to draw upon their group discussion and articulate and connect sticky notes to generate a novel curricular narrative for democratic citizenship education. Guiding questions will be provided. For instance, how would you define the who, the what, the how, and the context of your narrative? How would you ‘name’ this new narrative? Narrative exchanges (20 minutes). In this later step, each discussion group will be requested to discuss whether they think new curricular narratives can be renewed, and if so, present their tentative narratives to others. Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or Findings We have designed the workshop to facilitate the emergence of new curricular narratives for democratic citizenship education. However, we understand that research is not about discovering external realities but about creating new concepts or a “set of abstractions, ideas that have no function outside of demonstrating characteristics of experience that, without them, would be at risk of elimination” (Debaise, 2017, p. 164). As such, we do not anticipate finding an ‘answer’ to our current challenges in the shape of new narratives, but we are still hopeful that different new narratives can be drafted “from the unity of multiple entities as a way to elicit new possibilities (Stengers, 2005a, p. 184). Importantly, for us, in conceptualising and enacting the workshop as a gathering practice, we hope to open the door to novel curricular conversations about democratic citizenship education beyond the workshop timeframe. We are cautious about promising that the workshop in itself will enable the development of novel, more ethical and responsible narratives for democratic citizenship education. Yet, we will invite participants to continue conversations post-workshop and we remain optimistic that the workshop will facilitate that proponents and participants who refuse to let democracy go can experience democratic and educational growth and have a latter chance to contribute to renewing democratic citizenship education. We understand our workshop not as an event led by proponents, but as a practice of responsive collaboration with unpredictable outcomes (Honig, 2021; Stengers, 2005). As Honig (2021) explains, “[c]aught up in action, we [the proponents] are not in charge of it; we may well be its initiators, but we are not its authors. Indeed, we may well be surprised later to realize what we have done” (p. 2). References Bell, V. (2017). On Isabelle Stengers’ cosmopolitics: A speculative adventure. In A. Wilkie, M. Savransky, & M. Rosengarten (Eds.), Speculative research: The lure of possible futures (pp. 187–197). London & New York: Routledge. Council of Europe (2018). Reference Framework of Competences for a Democratic Culture. Strasbourg. da Costa, M. (2023). Ugly democracy: Towards epistemic disobedience in development education. Policy and Practice: A Development Education Review, 36(Spring), 14-32. Debaise, D. (2017). Speculative empiricism. Revisiting Whitehead. Edinburgh University Press. Honig, B. (2021) A feminist theory of refusal. Harvard University Press. Mazzei, L. A. (2021). Speculative inquiry: thinking with Whitehead. Qualitative inquiry, 27(5), 554-566. Merry, M. S. (2020). Can schools teach citizenship?. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 41(1), 124-138. Runciman, E. (2018). How Democracy Ends. London: Profile Books. Sant, E. (2021). Political education in times of populism. Springer International Publishing. Sant (Under Review). Learning from Disagreement. Stengers, I. (2005). Introductory notes on an ecology of practices. Cultural studies review, 11(1), 183-196. Taylor, C. A., & Bovill, C. (2018). Towards an ecology of participation: Process philosophy and co-creation of higher education curricula. European Educational Research Journal, 17(1), 112-128. Zembylas, M. (2022). Decolonizing and re-theorizing radical democratic education: Toward a politics and practice of refusal. Power and Education, 14(2), 157-171. Veugelers, W. (2024). Citizenship education for a diverse Europe. In Handbook of moral and character education (pp. 379-399). Routledge. Webb, P. T., & Mikulan, P. (2023). Escape education. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 55(12), 1316-1321. | ||