University of Vic. Barcelona, Spain
During recent decades, the commons approach has emerged as a tool with which to critically analyse current reality and propose alternatives. Using this approach, the paper asks how the common good can be promoted in education, especially in times and places of superdiversity. After a short conceptual presentation of the commons approach, I discuss the current approaches to the management of diversity (multicultural, intercultural, liberal, social cohesion) because they are all rooted in the romanticisation of grassroots participation, in fixed, substantive and reified identities, especially those given to minoritised groups, and because they tend to dismiss inequalities, especially between teachers and families and between diverse and unequal parents. Secondly, I propose the convivial approach based on avoiding essential identities and the indifference to difference in order to provide an alternative way to rethink schools as educational commons and to offer opportunities for collaboration and cooperation, generating a web of sustained connections between different actors. Finally, the paper outlines what schools as educational commons might look like in a superdiverse context and how this can be promoted as a new education policy. That is, how we might formulate education policy to enable schools to become invented spaces, participatory and self-governed common places and producers of alternative relations and identities.
