The public sphere has historically been conceived as a space for the translation of private troubles into collective issues. Such translation processes have an orientation towards the common good and a focus on collective rather than individual action. Many commentators have argued that the particular quality of the public sphere as a space for translation and collective action has come under pressure and may have disappeared altogether. This is partly the result of the rise of the logic of the market in social and political life, but may also have to do with the rise of forms of identity-based politics that emphasise the individual over the collective and identity over (democratic) subjectivity. These shifts have also had an impact on opportunities for civic and democratic learning. In this paper, which is based on our experiences with community education projects in Scotland that aim to reinvigorate the public sphere as a space of translation, we ask, through a critical and theoretically informed discussion of data from research on these projects, how opportunities for democratic learning in public spaces can be understood and theorised and how this can help us to promote such learning.