Session 5. 3.

In the context of our Knowledge Society (UNESCO 2005), libraries are a critical infrastructure to enhance a lifelong learning. Community libraries, university libraries or national libraries are shaping an educational environment where citizens can learn, discover, or exchange knowledge. The concept of educational commons presents an opportunity to broaden education and involve libraries in this process. Furthermore, with the growing need for information and digital literacy in our daily lives (e.g., fake news, deepfakes), libraries are well-positioned to address these challenges.

This communication aims to bridge the gap between knowledge commons and educational commons. We draw inspiration from Charlotte Hess’s work (Hess & Ostrom, 2007), a renowned librarian who emphasized the importance of collaborative approaches in education. To achieve this purpose, we will explore findings related to the LibrarIn project (Horizon Europe), which investigates co-creation of value in libraries.

Libraries are reconfiguring themselves to offer new services and experiences that cater to educational needs. Our analysis highlights key aspects of successful library collaborations with communities, including the development of participatory governance models, community-led digital literacy programs, and collaborative efforts to promote media literacy. We also examine the role of libraries in fostering critical thinking, creativity, and problem-solving skills among learners of all ages.
Through this research, we aim to contribute to a deeper understanding of the potential for libraries to play a central role in shaping educational commons. By doing so, we hope to inspire new models of collaboration between libraries, communities, and other stakeholders, ultimately promoting more equitable and inclusive access to knowledge and learning opportunities. Moreover, their missions align with specific interests: promoting education, equality, inclusion, and fostering democracy. In this communication, we will examine experiments, projects from libraries, and how they can contribute to reinforcing educational commons.

Hess, C., & Ostrom, E. (Éds.). (2007). Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From theory to practice. MIT Press.

Critiques of the dominant system expose how capitalism massively shapes our worldviews (De Lissovoy, 2022). This fundamental belief based on private perception, social antagonism and the anthropological type of “homo economicus” is extremely difficult to challenge: "it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism" (Jameson and Žižek). What ways are there to experiment that can emphasize by contrast the anthropological type of “homo socialis”? As De Lissovoy, Pechtelidis and Kioupkiolis argue, a pedagogy of the commons can transfigure our perceptions in democratic directions (Pechtelidis and Kioupkiolis, 2020), making learning “a collective good, which is created, governed, and enjoyed in common by all parties of the educational community” (De Lissovoy, 2022); hence education can be a laboratory for new social imaginaries.
Education is a tool of experimentation of collaboration and social relationships towards regenerative practices. Reclaiming the enclosures of learning from state control and private property, commons delve into old and new approaches of social justice and democratic control. Ostrom’s work on natural commons (Ostrom, 1990) opened a third way of organizational practice beyond state and private control, and the myriad practitioners and researchers that followed have broadened the conception of commons beyond natural resources to culture, knowledge, the Internet and indeed any domain that might be reorganized on the basis of democratic management.
This presentation will consider the following key questions: If we perceive education as a field of struggle (Biesta, 2011), how can we reorganize education as an institution of the commons and reappropriate learning? How can the teacher be reshaped into a democratic facilitator and companion and what can we learn from the practices of the myriad commons-based initiatives of the physical and digital world that are currently being practiced across societies?

The educational commons represent a radical alternative to capitalist education, which seeks to privatize schools, enclose knowledge production, and capture the surplus of convivial study. At the heart of struggles for the educational commons is a radical desire for other ways of being, thinking, learning, and living. In the threatening planetary context of ecological crisis, there is a tense relationship between need and desire: the commodified desires that capitalism generates are neither satisfying nor sustainable, yet it is unclear how a reduction of struggles for planetary commons will be successful if they are articulated strictly at the level of basic need. Drawing on the work of Agnes Heller, Herbert Marcuse, Dominic Pettman, and Noah De Lissovoy this paper seeks to mediate the tension between need and desire in Marxism and critical theory through an exploration of the utopian role Eros might play in the educational commons. Seeking a vision of ecologies of eros, the paper aims to develop a pedagogical vision for navigating the ecological dialectic of abundance and scarcity in struggles for the commons.

This paper, derived from a completed PhD thesis, explores methods and conditions for integrating the logic and ethics of the commons into the daily life of a public school. The focus is on how the theory of the commons can be transformed into a pedagogical proposition. The research is based on a case study in Greece, where commons-based elements were applied over a year in a sixth-grade classroom. The researcher, who also served as the class teacher, employed action research to create a dynamic environment where children actively participated in shaping learning and governance processes.
A framework was developed to introduce "commons-based pedagogical practices," where both teacher and students function as equal members of the educational process. This challenges traditional hierarchical structures in education. The framework identifies two categories: learning through collaborative knowledge management ("Commoning practices of learning") and governance through classroom self-organization ("Commoning practices of governance"). Practices like "peer learning" and "co-creation of knowledge" foster collaborative learning, while governance practices, such as "assemblies," "peer dialogue," and "peer accountability," involve students in decision-making and managing classroom responsibilities.
The paper highlights the results of these commons-based practices, showing how they promote "commoning" in education. The findings reveal disruptions to the conventional school structure, which opened space for altering habits, perceptions, and teacher-student relationships. The study introduced the concept of the "schoolized mind," referring to how students internalize the role of the student as a fixed identity shaped by school norms. This research emphasizes efforts to transform these entrenched perceptions by reshaping traditional forms of school experience and relationships.

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.