This paper analyses some of the findings of the participatory action research (PAR) conducted within the Horizon Europe project AECED “Transforming Education for Democracy through Aesthetic and Embodied Learning, Responsive Pedagogies and Democracy-as-becoming” in three secondary schools of Latvia. The PAR is designed to enable experiencing democracy-as-becoming by embedding the drama sketch learning method into pedagogical practice and to study the individual and collective growth of all its participants. Addressing schools as learning organisations, we initiate multi-level collaboration among the school headmasters, teachers, students, external experts, researchers and schools (OECD, 2016) to achieve sustainable improvements in the democratization of schools. This is a complex task in today’s unstable world including educational systems where uncertainty has become an inescapable feature of it. Hasinoff and Mandzuk suggest that traditional scientific principles can no longer be relied on to manage complex problems. Instead, they offer sensemaking as an approach best to navigate the dilemmas that arise in complex adaptive systems like education institutions in uncertainty (Hasinoff & Mandzuk, 2018). Some scholars consider sensemaking a cognitive process (Starbuck & Milliken, 1988). However, it is also argued that sensemaking is a social process (Maitlis & Christianson, 2014) or a social psychological process (Hasinoff & Mandzuk, 2018) because of individuals’ being embedded in a socio-material context. From the perspective of the Horizon Europe project AECED, we could interpret sensemaking in uncertainty as a more complex process that is based not only on cognitive and affective but also on the embodied side of human living, learning and interaction. Studies on body-mind connection reveal the inevitable role embodiment plays as a source and means for knowing, thinking, understanding, experiencing emotions, feeling, learning, and wellbeing (Payne, 2019). Our previous research showed that arts-based and embodied learning promotes democratic leadership (Woods, 2021) facilitating power sharing, holistic learning, relational wellbeing and transformative dialogue among the participants of the collaborative processes of collage-creation (Woods et al., 2021) and drama (Oganisjana et al., 2021). This phenomenon is explained by the opening of the participants of creative processes to each other, to the situation they find themselves in and to the problems to be solved with enhanced levels of mutual trust, self-confidence and willingness to co-think, co-understand, co-work and co-create. Thus, arts-based and embodied learning not only creates a ground for experiencing democracy as a process of becoming but also assists learners and pedagogues in collective sensemaking and navigating through uncertain and challenging situations.

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