What might schooling that equips us to participate in meaningful mutual or collective decision-making and democratic processes look like in practice?

There exists a substantial body of literature concerned with the relationship between our experience at school and 'democracy' or the possibility of people being able to meaningfully 'make decisions together about the things that affect them, and to enact those decisions' (Gilbert 2019). There are also important literatures exploring critical, participatory and emancipatory pedagogies and reimagining schools and their supporting institutional arrangements as part of a wider societal revolution against the individualist, hierarchical, competitive, market-driven arrangements that characterise what Patrick (2013) calls neoliberal doxa.

There is, however, a surprising lack of detailed empirical studies of how movements and communities that organise in participatory, egalitarian ways are already, in the here and now, trying to educate children differently. And, more specifically, on how in practice teachers and pupils in these settings negotiate the tensions between local and movement-level ideals of cooperation and egalitarianism and hegemonic neoliberal frameworks promoting individualism and competition.
This research aims to try and help fill this gap by exploring in detail how children are prepared for participation in grassroots democratic processes and collective decision-making in two contexts: a school serving a Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra (MST) settlement in Brazil and one or two schools in the province of Rio Negro that are deeply engaged with the Escuelas Cooperativas approach in Argentina. I will then consider, with colleagues working in learning support in England , how learning from these contexts might help us challenge and shift the neoliberal/neoconservative consensus around schools policy and consider how schools might become places in which children learn to meaningfully make decisions together, to enact participatory democracy.