In recent years, calls for more participatory, horizontal, and democratic research practices have become widespread because such research can transform how people think, act, and feel. PAR is transformative because it enables participants to think and feel outside the habitual assumptions that inform everyday practice. Participating facilitates questioning and new learning from active engagement with participants and thus meets uncertainty as methodological decicion. PAR is a “research-to-action approach that emphasises direct engagement of local priorities and perspectives” (Vaughn & Jacquez, 2020). As a methodology, it combines social analysis, (self-)reflective collective study of practice, and transformational action to improve practices or conditions (Kemmis et al., 2014; Berg &Lune, 2017; MacDonald, 2012; Fernie & Smith, 2010). This methodology values experiential knowledge and lived experience that can be used to address challenges of our life-worlds and achieve social change. In the presented project "Transforming Education for Democracy through Aesthetic and Embodied Learning, Responsive Pedagogies and Democracy-as-becoming" (AECED), an EU-Horizon funded project with six partner countries, the potential for transformation is reinforced by the nature of the research intervention – namely, aesthetic and embodied learning (AEL) and the use of arts-based and embodied (ABE) pedagogies. Engaging and interacting within an aesthetic learning environment can enable people to surface feelings and thoughts about themselves and how they relate to others. Doing this collaboratively supports people in reflecting on their everyday assumptions and what they can learn from their experience of AELD and ABE pedagogies. In our project, we are aiming for transformational change through the application of the ABE-based Guides regarding the three dimensions of individual and collective transformation, institutional/organisational learning and epistemic reimagination. For this, a methodological framework for all national teams has been co-constructed as orientation and living document to serve the iterative PAR approach in its potential to initiate transformation on the individual, organisational and epistemic level of education for democracy. Connecting to this framing, the project introduces aesthetic and embodied learning, responsive pedagogies and democracy-as-becoming with a threefold notion of democracy: social togetherness, political self-governance (in organizing) and a care-economy based on solidarity.

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