AECED - Aesthetic and Embodied Learning for Democracy

Description

Democracy is a lived experience, not simply a given technical process involving learning about its history, principles, rules, and institutions. Democracy as a way of governing, engaging with others, and acting as a democratic citizen involves sensations, sense, sensibilities, and sense-making of what is ethically important and to be valued. The project’s view ‘democracy-as-becoming’ does not approach democracy as destination to be reached but a constant relational process of becoming towards future possibilities underpinned by principles of power sharing, transforming dialogue, holistic learning and relational well-being. To flourish, democracy needs healthy roots in people’s engaged feelings, awareness, and sensibilities as embodied beings connected with each other and their localities, communities, and the natural world. Therefore, it cannot be understood and enacted simply through cognitive learning or technical interactive skills. Impartiality and disconnectedness from democratic societies, the inability or impossibility to ‘feel for’ democracy, may lead to experiences of apathy, passivity, anxiety, and lead to marginalization, polarization, and extremism. Yet, current prevailing education for democracy gives little attention to nurturing those aesthetic, affective, and embodied roots of democracy, creating the connectedness, omitting this fundamental dimension of learning – that is, the aesthetic and embodied nature of learning.

Objective

This project aims to remedy this omission of aesthetic and embodied aspect of learning for democracy. The project will: 1) design an innovative, evidence-based aesthetic and embodied pedagogical framework that has an impact on the practice of education for democracy through associated guides to practice that support responsive, participatory pedagogies, 2) test through participatory action research, a prototype of the framework and guides in differing phases of education and national contexts 3) refine the framework and guides based on the results from the participatory action research and 4) disseminate and activate exploitation of the pedagogical framework and guides by ‘trailblazer users’ for sustaining and further evolving transformation of educational cultures. The project’s scientific impact will be achieved through groundbreaking, transdisciplinary research that shows how aesthetic and embodied learning and responsive pedagogies for democracy facilitate new ways of experiencing and exploring self and others, enabling indeed democratic relations and nurturing predispositions and capabilities for active democratic citizenship and deepening democracy. Societal impact will be achieved through new pedagogical approaches that engage learners and educators’ hearts and minds, increase capacity for democratic citizenship that connects and evolves locally, and strengthen affective predispositions for challenging social injustices, engaging with conflict, and seeking mutual understanding.