Media Education and Educational Commons for Youth Civic Engagement. a Case Study from the Horizon 2020 Project Smooth

This presentation reports the findings of a case study included in the Horizon 2020 project SMOOTH: Educational commons for reversing inequalities. The project's main objective was to introduce and study the emergent paradigm of the educational commons (Cappello, Siino, Fernandes, Arciniega-Caceres 2023; Cappello & Siino 2022, 2023) as an alternative system of values and actions for promoting intercultural and intergenerational dialogue and establishing spaces of democratic citizenship that support the development of local communities. Our case study adopts this paradigm with insights derived from the field of media education. Hence, our research questions were as follows: (a) How do young people collectively experience and build the notion of educational commons? (b) How do participants (youth and adults) experience peer governance and how do they handle and resolve conflicts? (c) How does the co-creation of a photo-blog as a shared space of work help young people discover and develop a "civic intentionality" in the (digital) public sphere? (d) What are the effects of applying a commons' logic to address inequalities and achieve social inclusion of young people from vulnerable social groups? Fieldwork, framed in an ethnographic and action-research approach, was developed by examining the three dimensions of the notion of educational commons (commoners, commoning practices, and community).

References

Cappello G., Siino M., Fernandes N., Arciniega-Caceres M. (2023), Educational Commons. Democratic Values, Social Justice and Inclusion in Education, Springer, https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-51837-9

Cappello G, Siino M (2023). Media education and educational commons for youth civic engagement. A case study from the Horizon 2020 project SMOOTH. FRONTIERS IN SOCIOLOGY, vol. 7, p. 1-14, doi: 10.3389/fsoc.2022.1108229

Cappello G, Siino M (2022). Educational Commons. Pratiche educative di comunità, disuguaglianze e partecipazione, Francoangeli, Milano