School buildings are not merely infrastructures; they are public democratic spaces in which power relations, participation opportunities and everyday forms of living together become visible and negotiable. This panel explores how Spatial Justice (Soja, 2010),…
This panel examines how educational research can contribute to strengthening democracy by reducing structural inequalities through evidence-based interventions that have been shown to be successful in diverse contexts across the world (Ruiz-Eugenio et al., 2023).…
This panel explores how evaluation can assess and strengthen the reciprocal bond between learning and democracy, focusing on some of the critical twenty-first-century challenges: social inequality, digital transformation, and the growing proliferation of disinformation. We…
Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) quality is central (EU Council, 2022), if we are to offer children nurturing environments, where they can gradually build their knowledge, abilities and competences of increasing complexity. In fact,…
In diverse national contexts, higher education has been promoted as an engine for social mobility. This has been part of a meritocratic model in which the idea of struggling to climb the social ladder has…
Educational systems grounded in democratic principles should ensure that every learner – regardless of sociocultural, linguistic, economic, and any other form of structural disadvantage background – must access meaningful opportunities for growth and emancipation. In…
Despite the democratic ideal of equal opportunities that motivated post-war European educational reforms and the rise of new pedagogies, social inequalities persisted, resulting in waves of massification. In fact, as analysed by conflict theorists (Bourdieu…
Over recent decades, research and policy debates on educational participation (including vocational education and training) have emphasized non-economic barriers – educational pathways, cultural background, and soft skills. In many continental European systems, low fees and…
The diversity of class, gender and race between pupils has been extendedly studied from the perspective of (re)production of educational inequalities. However, school can also be conceived as a socialisation agent and a place of…
Cities have become central arenas where contemporary social tensions are concentrated, including widening inequality, persistent poverty, and growing socio-spatial polarization (Musterd et al., 2017). In these contexts, education systems face pressing patterns of segregation and…