“Lifting the Roof” With Democracy-as-Becoming: The Potential of Aesthetic and Embodied Learning for Innovating Governance in Educational Institutions A Pattern Approach

Contemporary societies face interrelated crises that strain democratic institutions, social cohesion, and ecological conditions. This article approaches governance as a relational, processual practice that can be reconfigured in and through aesthetic and embodied approaches. Drawing on qualitative material generated in the three-year Horizon Europe/UKRI project Transforming Education for Democracy through Aesthetic and Embodied Learning, Responsive Pedagogy and Democracy-as-becoming, the analysis revisits case studies with a focus on aesthetic and embodied learning in adult, professional, and organizational learning settings to ask what patterns of governance innovation towards democracy-as-becoming become visible when democratic learning is enacted as embodied, situated practice. Empirically, the study draws on data generated through case trials in six European countries with a participatory action research design and unfolds five patterns with analytic vignettes that illuminate repeating moments, processes and situations of embodied governance. Conceptually, the article is informed by an epistemic shift towards commoning, framing governance as embedded in concrete practices of possibility rather than bounded procedures. A pattern-oriented re-reading identifies recurring situations in which governance shifts are enacted through power-sharing, transforming dialogue, relational well-being, and holistic learning. These shifts appear as changes in individual stance, collective practice, and institutional culture, including processes of unlearning hierarchy and reworking institutionalized power relations. By articulating “promising patterns” grounded in situated educational practice, the article links democratic renewal to common(ing)activities and collective imagination in education.

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