Democracy is under threat. Not only in parliaments and parties, but also in our European societies we are facing a shift towards anti-democratic forces. In the last decades it is been neglect that democracy need to be learned continuously to secure and deepen it (Dewey 1916, Negt 1971 and 2004, Papadopoulos 2013) Especially educational institutions should play a important role in promoting learning and experimenting with democracy beyond voting. But are these educational institutions already per se democratic in their organisational and institutional practice? Do teachers and professionals already live democracy in their classrooms, in their teaching and counselling practices?

Based on these questions, the first workshop of the research trialogue between the three Horizon Europe funded sister projects AECED; CRITICAL CHANGE LAB and DEMOCRAT will depart from the understanding of democracy as social practice, shared by the three projects, to initiate a reflection about their conceptual foundations, results and common strategies to not only defend, but also revitalise democracy. Such funded EU Horizon programs on democracy can be understood as platforms for critical thinking and learning, for participatory research to strengthen democratic practices at a micro-, meso- and macro levels (Reitmair-Juárez et al 2024).

The social innovation project DEMOCRAT aims to strengthen democracy through an open social innovation approach for the development of a Competence framework for Responsible Democratic Citizenship (RDC), the redesign and implementation of innovative and context-sensitive Education for Democracy (EfD) curricula and learning methods in compulsory education.

DEMOCRAT defines democracy as to right to participate equally in the collective decision-making (Lessenich 2022) and also as a living practice that is constantly reproduced by citizens. DEMOCRAT took the notion »citizenship« as main expression of this dispute defining it as an »institution« that mediates rights and duties between the subjects of politics and the polities to which these subjects belong (see Isin 2002). Democracy is a terrain for permanent disputes over fundamental principles, rights of participation, deliberation and democratic procedures, but moderated through widely accepted rules and norms.

Participation in the deliberations of binding collective decisions is at the heart of liberal representative democracy. Under this premise, DEMOCRAT has developed a framework of four RDC-competences: solidary participation, deliberation, judgment of information, and democratic resilience. This was done in close cooperation with teachers, families and representatives of public authorities following the principles of open user innovation organising series of workshops and an online platform.

This principle was also applied in the following innovation steps, where a curriculum for transformative and holistic education for democracy including assessment tools was outlined, based on a previous research on the situation of EfD in the six DEMOCRAT countries. This research provides common criteria for the outline of the European curriculum to guide the teaching and learning approaches of teachers, educators and other stakeholder, as a bottom-up process and actor-oriented innovation approach; strengthening agency of citizens, particularly youth, active learning approaches, and holistic education approach.

The competence framework and the curriculum outline are tested in different pedagogical intervention in schools. To ensure comparability a competences assessment tool and project monitoring tools have been developed. Through the intervention also the assessment tool is also tested as it should serve for the teachers to obtain evidence of the progress in the competence learning.

Besides the discussion of the innovation approach and the evidence obtained, another crucial question to be discussed is how the experience of the interventions can be widespread in the concrete setting of the schools, among schools in the local, regional and national education system and beyond thus contributing so to the democratization of school and the education system.

The trialogue research workshops will be interconnected between the network 32 organizational education and the network citizenship education (network 34). The research workshop trilogy will not only or primarily to take into account the empirical research results of the three EU Horizon Projects, but will also link up with the notions of collective strategy development as well as organisational and political learning. DEMOCRAT tested its conceptual framework through series of interventions in schools often in cooperation with other local organisations. With this research and Innovation design, the questions are: - How others teachers in the school can learn from the concrete intervention? - How other schools (teachers and families) in the same education system can learn from these interventions? - How teachers, families and schools can learn from the intervention carried out in other education systems. This concerns how to promote national and European social movement to renew education for democracy. A second level concerns the governance level as the education systems are regulated by the state at the national, regional or/and local level for instance through curricula. The concept of advocacy coalitions is one approach of promoting reforms in education systems, here in relation to EfD. In this sense, we are interested in the nexus of EfD, policy learning process between stakeholders with different interest at organisational, local, regional, national and European level to achieve that the novel strategy becomes a broadly recognised and applied learning and teaching strategy in the education systems. DEMOCRAT plans to organise the research workshop in a 90 minutes format. It will be divided into two parts: a) The core presentation of the fundamental concept of democracy and EfD, and the results of the innovation actions undertaken in the course of the project. It counts with two resonances and comments from the other two research projects involved. b) This will be followed by a triadic participatory resonance in table groups on strategy development to promote mutual learning among practitioners and policy learning addressing the different stakeholders intervening in governance of the education system at local, regional, national and European level. These will be collected, presented and integrated into collective policy statements and briefs as well as in a joint special issue publication. Chair: Leif Kalev (DEMOCRAT) Co-Chair: Benjamin Mallon Discussant 1: Prof. Dr. Susanne Maria Weber (sister project AECED) Philipps-Universität Marburg; Susanne.maria.weber@uni-marburg.de Discussant 2: Fernando Hernandez (sister project CCLAB) University of Barcelona hernandez.fernando65@gmail.com

Considering the layers of policy making, our research workshop will reflect on the potentials for strengthening political impact and socio-cultural change. While classical notions of a specialist and expert approach focus on the individual political agent as a learner, against this individualizing ontological position, the ‘policy learning governance’ approach understands policy learning and policy learning governance as deliberate processes. The open social innovation approach gives the citizens affects by a social challenge to participate in the development of solution for EfD as teachers, students, families and other stakeholders as public authorities. It is based on the practitioners’ engagement to find collectively solutions based on a dialogue between practitioners and research. In our multi-level governance perspective, facilitating policy learning in complex social-ecological circumstances are core for democracy-as-becoming as collective strategy development. It concerns the question how social science theory and practice can interact to achieve the critical point converting novel ideas and concepts in processes of social innovations. This implies at least two aspects: a) The non-linearity and openness of innovation processes in which several actors with different perspectives and interests intervene. In the complex political process, the originally proposed innovation can change considerably in praxis and theory. b) It affects also the question of the transferability of novel strategies or imitation (Tarde 1903) as in the process of imitation the original idea is adapted to the concrete circumstance. It is the question how to design a mutual learning process among different stakeholders to creatively implement novel solutions. Such approaches maybe useful to discuss democracy-as-becoming from a multi-level governance perspective, which supports insights for adaptive governance in complex social circumstances and our challenged European democracies. We also discuss the empirical results of the Democrat project from diverse informed perspectives with a view on developing richer conclusions and policy recommendations.

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