Collaborative learning for democracy: Developing the foundations of a study trialling pedagogies nurturing aesthetic capabilities for democratic citizenship in schools

The project’s purpose is to develop and strengthen connections with EU partners and progress a project application for trialling innovative pedagogies harnessing the transformative potential of arts-based and embodied (ABE) methods and digital technologies to promote democratic citizenship. The focus is aesthetic capabilities - i.e. nurturing, through aesthetic collaborative learning, capabilities concerned with awareness and reflexive exercise of aesthetic and emotional dynamics integral to critical reflexivity, democratic leadership, deliberative democracy, collaboration, conflict and future-building. Its objectives are to: (a) develop the application’s theoretical foundations by synthesising partners’ shared theorising on ABE learning, technologies’ aesthetic affordances, democratic leadership and post-human (material-digital-human) co-agency, and transformations in awareness and critical reflexivity; (b) identify key gaps and priorities in knowledge, practice and meeting needs; (c) develop a methodological framework to underpin the trials' evaluation design and prepare an application outline paper; (d) build a team ethos and bonds maximising creative synergies between UK/EU partners.