Democracy is in danger and must be defended. Not only in parliaments and parties but also in our European societies, we are facing a shift towards anti-democratic and right-wing forces. We are facing and feeling the need to cultivate democracy not only in people's daily lives but also in our institutions and organizations. Especially educational institutions are crucial potentials for democratization and an experiential approach to democracy. But are these educational institutions already democratic in their organizational and institutional practice? Do teachers, educators, and professionals already live democracy in their classrooms, teaching, and counseling practices? Do the patterns of organizing already cultivate and foster democracy-as-becoming?

Based on these questions, three Horizon 2020-funded sister projects, AECED, CRITICAL CHANGE LAB, and DEMOCRAT intend to open up three trialogue research workshops. Like this, a reflexive dialogical, participatory, and re-imaginative space shall emerge, which allows us to join for analysis, reflection, collective strategizing, and re-envisioning our institutionalized and organized educational institutions and educational systems. Such funded EU horizon programs can be understood as platforms for critical thinking and learning, for participatory research to strengthen democratic practices at a micro, meso, and macro level (Reitmair-Juárez et al. 2024).

How can such platforms re-imagine education for democracy? How can they support organizational, institutional, and policy learning and foster impactful change (Apple et al 2023)? Against an apolitical and merely instrumentalist perspective, aesthetic and embodied learning, participatory multi-stakeholder approaches, and bottom-up approaches to organizational learning can contribute to what Biesta and Lawy (2006) call ‘citizenship-as-practice’. From an organizational education perspective, we see organizational citizenship as a potential for the future (Göhlich & Weber 2011). Here, existing conditional and institutional limitations open up toward democratic learning in organizations, of organizations, or between organizations (Goehlich et al. 2018). Grounded in an embodiment research and intervention approach, we refer to explicitly embodied learning settings (Tancredi et al. 2024) and to intersectional dimensions of embodied learning in this broad inter- and transnational field of democracy and citizenship education (Grammes et al. 2023). Democracy-as-becoming is a matter of experience-based reflexivity and imagination in arts and embodied engagement (McDonnell 2010).

Kenner (2021) shows that political educational processes can be reconstructed based on the experiences of participation of young people, like Fridays for Future, etc., but should be connected to democratic school development, which understands political engagement of young people as an educational opportunity instead of sth. that hinders organizational and institutionalized education. Democracy-as-becoming then refers to experiencing democracy and democratization of the classroom, the educational contexts, the institutional setting of learning, social and educational innovations, and multilayer policy learning.

The three Horizon 2020 Projects have been working in Participatory Action Research (PAR) Settings. All of them have been creating comparative case studies and integrating several layers and dimensions. All of them have created products, tools, and processes that can support education for democracy, democratization, and democracy learning. In all of the projects, institutional and policy learning has a role to play: The Critical Change LAB has developed a self-assessment tool to analyze educational institutions regarding their cultural democratic practice. The DEMOCRAT project has been working with schools, teachers, authorities, and the Council of Europe. The competence framework for democratic education can be scaled up and expanded from a niche to broader communities from a multi-layer governance perspective. The AECED project has been developing frameworks and guides for professional and organizational learning for all the institutionalized educational phases of formal education.

The trialogue research workshops will be interconnected between the Network 32 organizational education and the Network citizenship education (network 34). As mentioned above, the research workshops trilogy intends to take into account not only or primarily the empirical research results of the three EU Horizon Projects but to interconnect regarding the notions of collective strategy development as well as organizational and political learning. As organizational citizenship (Göhlich & Weber 2011) has been a longstanding topic in organizational education, organizational learning not only refers to the organizational meso level but is also interested in governance research. In this sense, we are interested in the nexus of citizenship education, democracy learning, and organizational learning within policy processes and governance systems, too. How can the project results be translated into organizational and policy learning? Based on their most prominent and innovative results, all the projects will reflect on the impact of their democracy-learning approaches. All of them will work on reimagining and re-newing education and collective strategy-development for democratization. All of them will co-reflect on organizational and policy learning and the process strategies to establish democracy-as-becoming as a policy learning process in multi-layer settings. We plan to organize the three research workshops in a 90-minute format each, focusing on methodological strategies, results, collective strategy development, and policy recommendation questions. Each research workshop will have its starting point, one of the Horizon 2020 projects. After the main input, two resonances and comments from the other two research projects will be included. While the AECED project focuses on aesthetic and embodied learning for democracy and addresses learning in organizations more, the Critical Change Lab has been addressing the institutional level, for example, institutional reflexivity and school development. DEMOCRAT has integrated national comparisons and the policy learning level. Based on the co-created joint and common concept, each research lab will be prepared, adapted, and delivered by the projects themselves. Each session will start with a core presentation and two resonances from the other two projects and will be followed by a triadic participatory resonance in table groups on collective strategy development in the specific field of interventions, strategies, and policies to be developed. These will be collected, presented, and integrated into collective policy statements and briefs as well as in a joint special issue publication.

Taking into account the layers of policy-making, we reflect on the potential for strengthening the political impact and structural change. While expert approaches focus on the individual political agent as a learner, against individualizing ontological positions, the ‘policy learning governance’ approach understands policy learning and policy learning governance as deliberate processes. By these, policy actors strategize, design, and govern policy learning processes toward achieving technical or political objectives (Zaki 2024). A societal approach to policy learning and collective strategizing refers to the participation of wide collectives, which influence government decisions and enhance citizen engagement. Collective strategizing related to a participatory action research approach relates organizational structures of collective intelligence to the created values (Olszowski et al., 2021). Strategies of political action like engagement, participation, and professional action are relevant in this field. In our multi-level governance perspective, facilitating learning and adaptation in such complex social-ecological circumstances are core for democracy-as-becoming a collective strategy development. How can community-based management and regional/national government-level management connect here? How and in which way do they promote collaboration and dialogue around goals and outcomes? Such questions help us reflect on the governance innovations needed. Capacity building for democratic resilience and innovation can also be reflected based on integrated models of analysis. Tancredi et al. (2024) suggest integrating three bodies of knowledge in this field: a) common property theory, b) resilience thinking, and c) political ecology. From the commons and resilience literature, they integrate normative principles of adaptive, multi-level governance, for example, participation, accountability, leadership, knowledge pluralism, learning, and trust. The second source taken into account from political ecological interpretations, reveals the challenge of actualizing these principles. Such approaches may be useful for discussing democracy-as-becoming from a multi-level governance perspective. It supports insights for adaptive commons governance in complex social-ecological circumstances and our challenged European democracies.

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