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Conference on “Educational commons and active social inclusion” in Volos, Greece organized by SMOOTH on May 26-28, 2023.

The Inclusion4Schools project took part with several presentations on the conference of the SMOOTH Project in Volos (Greece) at the end of May.

The EU-funded research project SMOOTH (Horizon 2020) intends to introduce the emergent paradigm of the ‘commons’ as an alternative value and action system in 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. We want to study if ‘educational commons’ can operate as a catalyst for reversing inequalities through various methods such as pedagogical documentation, pedagogy of active listening, ethnography and discourse analysis.

SMOOTH organized an international conference to bring together researchers, practitioners, teachers, civil society organizations, activists, journalists, and policy-makers to discuss the challenges and opportunities of a commons-oriented education to reverse inequalities, to present good practices resulting from ongoing projects, and to inform political decision-making processes.

The conference critically drew 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. It addressed active social inclusion according to the ‘educational commons’, through a variety of methodologies such as pedagogical documentation, pedagogy of (active) listening, ethnography, discourse analysis, etc. Proposals relating to the improvement and enrichment of educational policy were a key area of the conference.

The aim of the conference was to deepen and advance the emergent field of educational commons by discussing the following research questions from theoretical as well as empirical viewpoints:

  • Can educational commons serve as a catalyst for reversing inequalities and an inclusionary strategy for children and youth at risk of social exclusion in Europe?
  • How educational commons can contribute to the reversal of inequalities?