Educational commons refer to learning communities where decisions about the educational process are taken collectively with equal participation in assemblies jointly by the three groups of teachers, learners and their guardians (when they are under age). The very practice of education and learning becomes a common good or resource which is collectively shaped and managed by the members of the educational community in terms of equality, freedom, active and creative participation.
In the educational commons, adults and children communicate and collaborate beyond the conventional age and learning divisions and hierarchies in a process of collective inquiry and learning that is resourceful, critical and ongoing. Educational life (formal and non-formal) as a whole, from the curriculum and daily instructional programme to the maintenance of the school grounds, etc., is co-managed and co-constructed by all its members in terms that tend towards equal power and equal participation. In the educational commons, teachers/educators become ‘fellow companions’ who facilitate and support, rather than guide with instructions, the educational process, in which students or pupils are largely self-acting, creating individually and cooperating with each other.
Bourassa, G. N. (2017). Towards an elaboration of the pedagogical common. In A. Means, D., R. Ford, & G. Slater (Eds.), Educational commons in theory and practice (pp. 75–93). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
De Lissovoy, N. (2011). Pedagogy in common: Democratic education in the global era. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 43(10), 1119–1134.
Kioupkiolis, A., & Pechtelidis, Y. (2017). Youth Heteropolitics in Crisis-ridden Greece. In S. Pickard, & J. Bessant (Eds.), Young People and New Forms Politics in Times of Crises: Re-Generating Politics (pp.273-293). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Korsgaard, M. T. (2018). Education and the concept of commons. A pedagogical reinterpretation. Educational Philosophy and Theory, vol.50.
Pechtelidis, Y. (2018). Heteropolitical Pedagogies, Citizenship and Childhood. Commoning Education in Contemporary Greece. In C. Baraldi & T. Cockburn (Eds.), Theorising Childhood: Citizenship, Rights, and Participation (pp.215-239). Palgrave Macmillan.
Pechtelidis, Y., Kioupkiolis, A. (2020) ‘Education as Commons, Children as Commoners: The Case Study of the Little Tree Community,’ Democracy and Education, 28(1): 5.
For a more extensive review see SMOOTH, Deliverable D1.1., Review of conceptual and theoretical literature, pp. 90-113.