Educating Democracy in Practice: Policy, Governance, and Democratic Becoming Across Educational Contexts

Abstract

In an era marked by democratic backsliding, digital disruption, and contested senses of belonging, this panel examines how citizenship education as public policy and governance shapes contemporary forms of citizenship and citizen agency. While citizenship is conventionally tied to rights, duties, and participation within liberal democracies, current turbulence reshapes both the meaning and practice of democratic participation and belonging. Building on citizenship education research that positions it as a democratic infrastructure rather than a narrow pedagogical activity, the panel investigates how educational policies and governance arrangements enable or constrain political agency and subject formation. Contributions explore the interplay between curricula, institutions, and actors—including schools, local governments, civil society, and teachers—as sites where power, identity, and participation are negotiated and contested in everyday practice. We examine how governance modes (hierarchical, co-governance, and self-governance) influence both formal and non-formal educational spaces, shaping who gets recognised as a capable political subject and how participation is enacted. By situating citizenship education within broader democratic challenges, the panel contributes to understanding how educational processes mediate power relations, belonging, and participation among diverse groups—including marginalised and emergent political actors. Ultimately, this panel argues that citizenship education must be reconceptualised as governed practice of democratic becoming, responsive to turbulent socio-political dynamics that redefine what it means to be a citizen or subject today. Through theoretical, empirical, and policy-oriented insights, the panel advances critical dialogue on the ways education systems both reproduce and transform contemporary regimes of citizenship.

Title	Details
From Competence to Becoming: Rethinking Democracy Through Curriculum Policy	View Paper Details
Citizenship Education as Public Policy and Governance: Approaches, Actors and Practices	View Paper Details
School-Labs as Democratic Micro-Publics: Education for Democracy Between Theory and Policy	View Paper Details
Living Labs as a Field of Research and Social Change: Towards Creating and Testing Democracy	View Paper Details
From Civic Learning to Democratic Competence: Understanding the Democracy–Education Nexus	View Paper Details