Schools as Educational Common Places in an Era of Superdiversity: Policy Debates and Proposals for Citizen Education

Abstract

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, it discusses the current approaches to the management of diversity (multicultural, intercultural, liberal, social cohesion) that, produced from the same episteme based on substantive identities and schools as ‘invited’ spaces, provide unexpected barriers to the development of schools as inclusive and participative commonplaces. With this conceptual foundation of the problem in place, the paper then examines the convivial approach as an alternative way to rethink schools as educational commons and to offer opportunities for collaboration and co-operation, 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. It focuses on specific policies that might promote conviviality and education as a common good in which schools become ‘invented’ spaces, participatory and self-governed common places, and producers of alternative citizenship, relations, and identities.

1. Introduction

The 2015 UNESCO Report “Rethinking education: towards a global common good?” from which the quote cited above is taken, makes three points that constitute the starting point for this paper. The first point is the diversity of values, beliefs, and perspectives on education that will necessarily derive from cultural diversity; the second is that diversity should be celebrated and cultural chauvinism rejected; and the third point, which runs through the report’s conclusions, is that in order to enhance education as a common good, civic society and ‘participatory processes’ should play a greater role. In this paper, I address these issues by examining how we might move towards a participatory ethos and practices that promote education from the standpoint of, and for, the common good in diverse and unequal societies. The paper also focuses on the notion of conviviality, which is closely related to that of the common good, and asks a number of questions related to both notions: what would a participatory, inclusive, and self-governed education policy orientated towards and for the common good look like? What sort of relationships between parents and teachers and between diverse and unequal parents would it involve? And especially, what specific educational policies and practices might be deployed to foster the common good, conviviality, citizenship, and a convivial disposition in schools, especially in times and places of superdiversity?

2. Conceptual Foundation

2.1. The Commons Approach: A Brief Conceptual Appraisal

The commons approach is, I suggest, a powerful tool with which to critically analyse our current reality and to propose alternative visions of education, forms of (self)government, and identities. It is based on the work of Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom, who studied hundreds of successful experiences of “Governing the commons” [1] around the world. Against the inaccurate prophecy that governing lands, pastures, forests, or fish banks in common would lead to the depletion and abuse of natural resources [2], Ostrom demonstrates quite the contrary. Managing in common can be more effective and efficient than either market or state (or private-bureaucracy) models. It is more democratic, more sustainable, and has more positive impacts in the community. Even Hardin recognised his mistake [2] and the potential of governing in common the commons. Ostrom’s arguments boost research that sheds light on the enclosure process of the commons during modernity and its consequences. According to different authors [3,4,5,6,7,8], modernity and its main processes (urbanisation, industrialisation, individualisation, etc.) are based on a long process of enclosures—colonisation both of natural and human resources and of social relations (knowledge, social mixing, etc.). During the last few decades, there has been a worldwide movement that uses the commons approach to propose new social patterns. In the case of educational commons, diverse experiences and concepts point to new meanings, new power relations, and new subjectivities against the dominance of neoliberal and neoconservative education policy and in favour of new education patterns, actors, (self)government, and outcomes [9,10,11,12,13,14,15].

Drawing on authors like De Angelis [16], Bollier [17], Bollier and Helfrich [18], and Laval and Dardot [5], I propose a concise definition of the commons approach as involving the equal and inclusive participation of all members of the educational community in the co-construction of the educational project, collective self-governance and the production of different subjectivities. Leitheiser and colleagues [19] offer examples of these abstract concepts in practice. They note that much of the literature around the common good is informed by a desire to go beyond the state vs. market binary as a solution to social provision and reclaim the ‘democratic imaginary as a political arena’ [10] (p. 3). They contend that a process of ‘commoning’ involves an active, bottom-up form of democracy that can repudiate and regenerate the staleness of formal representative democracy and the distance of state institutions from lay people, understanding ‘commoning as a democratic process of negotiating institutional rules and norms to serve the common good and foster solidarity’ [10] (p. 3). To illustrate their argument, they refer to civic-led initiatives of Food Policy Councils in several German cities, noting the potential and limitations of these groups. Related to this experience, they argue for ‘invented’ spaces rather than ‘invited’ ones. That is, for the capacity of the commons to co-produce new realities and new identities from the bottom up through commoning, democratic, and participative practices, as opposed to a top-down process that relegates citizens to a passive role.

2.2. Educational Commons

In considering the educational commons approach in relation to schools [12], several areas of tension and difficulty need to be acknowledged. Much of the tension could be broadly described as the romanticisation by some of the literature of widening grassroots democratic participation. As Amin and Howell [20] argue, the language of the commons is sprawling and unspecific with a ‘dark side’, and easy assumptions are often made about the progressive nature of the commons. They further note [20] (p. 10) that the use of ‘the language of community’ can assume and romanticise the idea of a singular community—‘the Muslim community’ (our example), for instance—without appreciating the homogenising and reifying effect of such labels. They observe further that phrases such as ‘community control’ have an easy but often misleading appeal. These observations and concerns do of course need to be borne in mind when focusing on the many benefits of the commons approach.

In relation to the common good, processes of commoning and our focus on families, teachers, and schools, two further issues need to be raised. The first is that the concept of educational commons needs to address what, as several decades of sociological research have analysed, is an entrenched and embedded divide between teachers and parents. The dominant view of parental engagement is one where parents are supporters of the school, only able to enter the school when invited [21,22]. Second, I focus here on schools with diverse populations and the cleavages of social class, race/ethnicity, religious belief, and so on that may well inform different views, perspectives, and beliefs, thereby potentially dividing the families whose children attend the school and/or further dividing teachers and parents. Structural inequalities pervade both issues. Dobbernack [23] makes this point, noting that some existing theories of civic inclusion rely on a ‘disembodied logic of human rights’ (p. 568) and reveal a failure to understand existing inequalities (e.g., between migrant populations and the majority) and the need for new approaches [24]. I will discuss these issues—fixed and reified identities (especially those given to minoritised groups) and inequalities in the power to identify and name the issues and priorities in specific schools—further below.

2.3. How Current Education Policies Manage Differences: Promoting Schools as Commons

After decades of multicultural/intercultural policy recognising cultural diversities, promoting dynamics of encounter and some attempted reduction in structural and collective inequalities related to racism, states in Western Europe and elsewhere have turned to introducing civic integration policies. With European leaders declaring over a decade ago that multiculturalism is ‘dead’ [25], states are in different ways and to different extents ‘managing’ diversity by reinforcing boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’, using citizenship tests, language tests, and integration tests [26]. Schooling is also being used for such ‘civic integration’ and ‘social cohesion’ processes across Europe. This is an approach that, for Osler [27], highlights the focus on individual integration, the spread of ‘national values’ in education, and the growth of ethnonationalism across Europe.

The promotion of national values has been re-emphasised, as globalisation makes nations more interconnected than ever. As European publics have come to see migration as a threat to national values […], citizenship education policies are reframed in terms of national values. The additional focus on national values in an age that has seen a growth in ethnonationalism is itself problematic as it threatens to redefine who belongs to the nation in an exclusionary way [27] (p. 570).

Recent education policies seek to manage and respond to the growing racial, ethnic, and religious differences in the population through civic integration policies that focus on “their” individual integration into “our” society. Here, there is little space for difference and there is an imposition of one idea of the common good: “ours”. Schools remain spaces where “we” invite “them” to be like us [19], far from being common places to be co-invented—common places where what Giroux [28] calls “border pedagogy” can be practised. That is, the opportunity for students to engage with multiple references that constitute different cultural codes, experiences, and languages; the struggle to create an invented space, a radical democratic school and society. The contrary of what hate speeches spread and teachers must deal with [29].

Precisely Chin [25] analyses the way in which public policy has narrowed the criteria for who is included within what Hollinger [30] (p. 323) has called ‘the circle of the “we”’, with one’s affiliations counting for more than one’s “raw humanity”. And Sriprakash et al. [31] highlight how ethnic/racial diversity in society and education today is still based on what W.E.B. Dubois called the colour line, where such substantive differences are highlighted over others and used to produce, justify, and normalise diverse forms of domination, segregation, division, and exclusion in material, intellectual, and affective dimensions. With such a panorama, and with the notion of multiculturalism being abandoned even by those who are committed to “lived multiculture”, some have suggested the notion of conviviality as providing an alternative conceptual base to multiculturalism [25] (p. 287). Such a notion might help us move beyond the “ethno-focal lens” and give greater attention to different axes of differentiation within each ethnic group to better understand the dynamics of their inclusion or exclusion [32] (p. 2). And it might also enable us to conceptualise the promotion of the common good in education, especially in times and places of superdiversity [33] (p. 2), that is, ‘an exceptional demographic situation characterized by the multiplication of social categories within specific localities’. An ‘exceptional situation of diversified diversity, with no minority group dominating and large differentiations within groups. This situation (…) forms part of everyday lived reality and is not perceived as unusual’ [33] (p. 2).

The next section examines in more detail the notion of conviviality, especially with respect to how it might help us think through the potential of schools to become educational commons, co-produced from and for the common good, and offer opportunities for contribution and collaboration, inventing and generating sustained connections between different actors involved with the school.

3. Conviviality: The Capacity to Live Together

The findings of research in social geography are a rich resource here, as studies often highlight the ways in which people in diverse environments regularly interact with one another in peaceable and competent ways during mundane moments of engagement, illustrating considerable reserves of multicultural competencies and convivial behaviours (e.g., refs. [34,35,36]). Here, conviviality is defined, following Gilroy [37] (p. xi), as ‘the processes of cohabitation and interaction that have made multiculture an ordinary feature of social life’. Wise and Noble note that Gilroy draws on the Spanish term ‘convivencia’, commenting that:

Convivencia, as shared life, includes an emphasis on practice, effort, negotiation, and achievement. This sense of “rubbing along” includes not just “happy togetherness” but negotiation, friction, and sometimes conflict. It signals belonging and new forms of community as practice, as hard labour [38] (p. 425).

This approach follows Ivan Illich’s perspective [39] on a convivial society, which he defined as one in which all members have as much autonomous and creative action as possible, supported by diverse tools, and with minimum control by others. For Back and Sinha [40] (p. 522), conviviality offers ‘an alternative understanding of culture that focuses on what people do every day, rather than always reducing them to their cultural origins’. I agree with Noronha [41] (p. 160) that ‘conviviality has proved useful for scholars looking to describe and analyse the capacity of “diverse” people to live together, despite the ongoing and often divisive politicisation of their ethnic, national and religious differences’. This capacity to move beyond “substantive” identities, obviously variable between individuals, is, however, evident in studies of people in shared urban spaces and also in private/semi-private spaces such as community groups:

That people mix with and encounter one another and manage cultural difference and ethnic identity in more contingent, pragmatic, and ‘at ease’ or convivial ways than is popularly imagined is a core argument of those engaged in the emergent ‘everyday multiculture’ approach. This argument does not ignore tension and discord, but rather pays attention to the co-existence of other, often slight and spontaneous and sometimes amicable forms of multicultural social interaction that can occur and be thrown up in the vast range of settings that are moved through in the practices of daily life [36] (p. 315).

However, focusing on individual encounters alone, as Neal et al. [36] argue, provides a fragile base for developing attitudes and behaviours that resist exclusion and othering. Nowicka [42] observes that the literature has to date largely ignored state institutions and the role that they might play in providing spaces in which to further conviviality. State schools, especially smaller, local primary schools, seem to us to have the potential to be clear examples of what Amin calls ‘sites of shared living’ [43] (p. 79). He sees the potential of ‘prosaic sites’ (within which he includes ‘spaces of learning’), as spaces where formal ‘habits of being with others and in a common space’ take shape. The goal is for individuals to have and realise the benefits of a ‘habituated experience of the city as a commons’ (p. 79) arising from practical experience, making ‘connections and dependencies visible’ (p. 79) and a ‘public articulation’ of what sites of shared living ‘add to personal and collective life’ (p. 79).

Some scholars have doubts, however. Nowicka [42] sounds a warning, suggesting that the research on conviviality is overly optimistic and that most examples of conviviality in the literature are actually instances of courtesy, what Samamani refers to as ‘thin civility’ [44] (p. 4). However, Vincent et al. [45] argue that such moments still have potential (see below) as steps towards ‘the politics of co-operation’ [25] (p. 11). Key to this politics is promoting the importance of ‘a quality of relations, a principle of co-operation and of responsibility to each other’ [25] (p. 11). Amin and Howell use Frederici [46] (p. 289) and Gilbert [47] (p. 165) on understanding diverse people as bound together:

By their shared interest in defending or producing a set of common resources […] The common is not a quality shared [such as a common good] as much as something produced through various kinds of ethical and cooperative relationships, including the affective, the discursive and the political [25] (p. 11–12, our emphasis).

Bearing in mind Nowicka’s caution, I turn next to some underlying principles and tensions of imagining an education policy that promotes schools as common places, as places for conviviality. The main part of Section 4 then considers specific policies and practices that might promote the common good and conviviality in schools.

4. Promoting Schools as Educational Commons and Convivial Places

4.1. Producing Ethical and Cooperative Relationships: Some Tenets

Instead of thinking about schools as invited, clearly defined, and closed places, our proposal is about co-constructing them as non-substantive institutions, as a common infrastructure, as a formal educational commons in which all parents, children, and teachers have a stake and can invent and co-construct each school. This co-construction allows people to formally cooperate and to take responsibility for the school as an infrastructure in common. The material context and funding are clearly important here [47]. Schools as commons could be produced by education policy as social and educational infrastructures, as “palaces for the people”, as physical spaces where different people can assemble [48]. Schools, as formal infrastructures, could actively promote human interaction and participation and be invented spaces that foster conviviality and its co-creation. It is about seeing schools as ‘lively infrastructures’ [49] (p. 138) where both the material and cultural promote togetherness and co-operation, harnessing the inevitable plurality and conflicts. As Sennett observes [50], it is about producing the formal rituals, pleasures, and politics of co-operation and the conditions of possibility of individual and collective formal co-operation in a common place. Some abilities, capacities, and practices that can facilitate and promote this in the everyday life of schools include being with others, kindness, listening, and, above all, collaborative action—because ‘co-presence and collaboration are two very different things’ [47] (p. 59), and constructing schools as educational commons requires the latter and not the former. Negotiating such co-presence is clearly demanding and would require considerable emotional labour. Samanani offers the example of the emotional effort and labour that conviviality requires from his study of a community centre in London. He writes of people working to bridge differences, with effort and thought: ‘convivial labour and care’ involves ‘continual negotiation’ [51] (p. 184). But from what perspective?

4.2. Moving Away from Thinking of Schools as a “Substantive Community” and Constructing Them as a Commons

What is particularly useful about the idea of the (educational) commons as a policy, as understood through the lens of conviviality and distinct from the idea of a substantive and already defined community, is that it does not depend upon any presumption that the participants will be bound together in a singular community by a shared ethnic/racial identity or a homogeneous culture. Nor does the task require the dissolution of singularities in a pretended neutral community, as this would obscure the ‘privileges of whiteness’ [52] (p. 207) and the normalisation of white, middle-class, and autochthonous families. Sripakash et al. [31] (p. 87), writing about combating white supremacy and the settler colonial state education, argue for the need to ‘create and hold open spaces for grappling with injustices of racism and settler colonialism; to cultivate relations of collective solidarity; to support an education that reckons with the past, present, and futures of whiteness. Past proposals of “happy multiculturalism” and substantive cultural identity [53] tend to exalt diversity but hide inequalities and imbalances in power relationships. The main perspectives to overcome this situation and promote conviviality tend to be based on substantive, enclosed, and homogeneous cultural and collective identities from which schools promote “their” integration (multicultural, intercultural, civic inclusion, and so forth) [23].

Instead of that approach, I draw on the work of Delgado [54], Sennett [55], Valluvan [52] and Amin [49] to argue for a position that focuses on the unequal conditions of possibility for cultivating a school as a common good for producing formal collaborative participants, instead of using substantive cultural diversity and identities to build up boundaries among families and children. Our position is that schools are not about the dissolution of singularities into a pretended neutral community. We are concerned instead with the possibilities for co-constructing schools as educational commons, as something produced through various kinds of convivial, cooperative, democratic, and ethical formal relationships, including the affective, the discursive, the conflictual, and the political, between various kinds of necessarily differentiated actors or agents. Schools as invented spaces instead of invited ones [19]; as formal places orientated to practice “border pedagogy” [21] regardless of differences, as places in common, avoiding capturing people in reified, predefined, and substantive identities that divide “us”. An ‘us’, according to Sennett [55] (p. 288) “that loses the exclusive semiological reference linked to race (or other identity axes) and thus makes the values of integration and equality visible” and possible in a concrete way. A common place for all those who share the school, despite diversities and inequalities. In a wider context of what Connolly [56] calls the ever-hastening ‘minoritisation’ of the world—the multiplication of all kinds of ‘minorities’ in the same territorial space—the development of such a commoning that resists the siren call of substantive belonging and identity is as urgent as ever [20].

However, I recognise, as one further difficulty, that there is potential tension for schools, as institutions, to bring diverse people together to produce commoning relations. How can education policy encourage schools to become a common space with common strategies where values, priorities, and principles may differ greatly amongst a superdiverse population with different experiences of education? I recognise of course that dimensions of individual subjectivity such as ethnicity/race are very valuable to individuals; they are an integral part of who we are, and they shape our experiences and worldview. To both recognise people’s identities and ask them to also be ‘indifferent to difference’, as Amin [49] puts it, is easy to say but much harder to put into practice. Treading the thin line between recognising conviviality’s capacity to connect across difference, to transcend bounded identities without erasing them [51] and holding relations together across ‘deep and endurable differences’ [51] (p. 187) is a project fraught with difficulty.

4.3. Specific Policies That Might Promote the Common Good, Conviviality, and Convivial Dispositions

Nevertheless, there are several ways in which conviviality and the common good might be promoted, and this section considers this from a number of perspectives. First, it examines plurilingual school projects that have been developed in superdiverse schools in Spain. These aim to move beyond the episteme and political tenets that underlie the various existing policies of managing diversity (assimilationist, multicultural, intercultural, and civic integration) and provide a basis from which to imagine convivial policies. And second, it gathers together a number of specific policies that might promote the commons approach, conviviality, and also a convivial disposition in school staff, parents, and the community as a whole.

With regard to plurilingual school projects in Spain, Palau and Fons [57] explicitly aim to move beyond the past and current policies of managing diversity because the episteme and political tenets of these policies are quite similar. Instead, plurilingual projects, until now developed in superdiverse schools in Spain with families and children with dozens of languages and cultural and religious traditions, understand the school as an invented and conflictual project to be developed in common. A common good that is not already closed and clearly defined (curriculum, didactics, formal relations, knowledge, resulting subjectivities, and so forth) but has to be co-constructed locally by its members as rulers of the educational commons. A place where every family and child is equally recognised as participants and co-governors of the school with the teachers and headteacher as an evolving and changing reality. The tenets of such projects, which have already been implemented in a number of schools, include, first, being based on three intertwined systems: school, families, and community. Ontologically, there is no such thing as the isolated school beyond families and the community. Secondly, the education policies behind plurilingual projects do not promote self-sufficient schools. Rather, they promote schools that are needed by others: other professionals on the staff (social workers, psychologists, emotional workers, and so forth), as well as other stakeholders like families, sports associations, religious communities, community services like libraries and museums, music and arts associations, and so forth.

Third, all languages and cultures are recognised as equally valued in the school, even if they are not the language of the school, Spanish. As a result, all school activities are carried out in Spanish and are contrasted and explained in all the mother tongues of the class pupils and enriched by their cultural backgrounds. This could include the use of exercises like asking questions such as “How is it said in…?”, or “Do you have the same ecological/social/technological realities in…?”; having families read tales in their own language to all the pupils supported by visual elements; getting children to go to places in the community to learn or participate in community and/or extracurricular activities, among others, which can become the new normal school co-produced in common. Thus, each class, subject, and the whole school becomes a common place in which individual and group cultural inheritances are recognised and social inequalities overcome. But not in a substantive, closed, invited way. On the contrary, because the main goal is not to highlight diversity as something problematic for mainstream culture, or for each other, but to put all these together to build up a better common good, a better school that has to be co-constructed every day, in common and in which the result in terms of learning, governance, and relationships is open, diverse, democratic, and collective. It is an exercise in conviviality, in fighting against inequalities and barriers and inventing education, in the broad sense of the word, through self-government in which unequal power relations do not disappear but are challenged from a different episteme. Under this episteme, the diversity of children, families, and community is not seen as a problem to be solved by teachers but rather constitutes different “owners” of the same commons: “our” school. According to Ishimaru and Takahashi [58], resetting the established power balance in diverse schools requires disrupting ‘racialized institutional scripts’ which offer strongly normative understandings of diverse children, parent-teacher relations, and so forth, informed by deficit understandings of “them”. Instead, plurilingual policy describes the importance of collaborative activity in order to be aware and to address this. In the plurilingual policy towards which some schools in superdiverse areas are moving, there is no division between “us”, the “normal” ones, and “them”, the diverse and the different, because all of them are part of that convivial and common “us” called school. Vincent et al. [45] (p. 208) further noted:

Primary schools can be understood as a very particular form of shared resource or commons—not only do they effectively stretch beyond their institutional boundaries into their surrounding communities or localities, but they are the formation of children’s identities, of future citizens. In this context, we suggest that in the familiar routines, micro-social interactions, and small-scale relations that shape a primary school environment, there is evidence of ongoing, if sometimes uneasy, multicultural participation.

As I have argued here for the construction of schools as convivial common places able to produce commoning relations and different subjectivities, it is necessary to resist the idea of substantive, stable, and homogeneous identities. Similarly, Samanani [44] (p. 3) argues for the importance of ‘cultivating a (reflexive and/or habituated) understanding that identities are contingent, fluid, and dynamic, rather than given, bounded, and stable’. Vincent et al. [45] argue that two forms of mixing across difference could be observed in the school playgrounds—the most common site where parents met and mingled. The first, derived from Goffman’s concept of ‘civil inattention’, is ‘civil attention’: i.e., smiles, nods, small talk—light engagement that recognises the other’s right to be present in a shared convivial space. This is a proposal very close to van Leeuwan’s [58] notion of ‘side-by-side civility’. Neal et al. [59] argue that such light engagement is still important for its recognition and acceptance of ‘others’.

Shifting from “inattention” to “attention” is intended to highlight the different mutualisms that the sustained sharing of social goods can involve. In short there is a more focused and active recognition of diverse others required when a population repeatedly inhabits and shares the same (school) world.

The second form is what Vincent et al. [45] (p. 216) called ‘convivial dispositions’, by which they understand pro-diversity competencies and attitudes, including intentional and purposeful behaviours to bridge difference, as enacted by a small number of parent participants in the research.

I suggest that the sharing of the primary school as commons can not only foster civil attention, but also possibilities for sustained encounters, interactions, and social bonds, and the potential to develop a convivial and citizen disposition in which tension and strain are not absent but accommodated within a reflective and granular approach to the experience of difference and the development of affective interactions and social relations.

I now turn to specific policies that might promote the commons approach, conviviality, civil attention, and a convivial disposition related to two possible dimensions: (a) teacher–parent relationships, and (b) the relationship between local families.

(a)

The relationship between teachers and parents

As noted earlier, the established, embedded traditional form of parent-teacher relationship places parents in a firmly subservient position, despite talk of ‘partnership’. Parents are routinely offered roles as supporters of the school, supporting their children with homework, attending school events, backing school decisions, and following—and encouraging their children to follow school rules. They are also learners, following the teacher-prescribed priorities and values and learning how to use phonics to help young children read [60]. The relationship is understood and positioned as a highly individualised one, and collective parent-school relationships do not feature heavily in the research literature [21,61]. Kathryn Riley [62] (p. 271) argues for the importance of school headteachers building institutional (the expectations and norms of an institution) and relational (the interactions between individuals) trust. Vincent [63] has suggested that focusing on the mundane interactions of parent-teacher meetings and moving these towards a formal ‘of equals’ that is more holistic in orientation than the current one-way report from the teacher to the parent on the child’s current achievement level can promote conviviality.

For moving beyond the deficit perspective, Ishimaru and Takahashi [60] describe the importance of collaborative activity to promote a formal community; specifically, in initiatives to design a parent education curriculum, involving parents, researchers, teachers, and initially headteachers. In doing this, a convivial and common activity, the parents drew on their knowledge of their own children and their concerns around bullying and racial identity at school. The researchers describe the way in which ‘fostering collective adult learning spaces [built] transformative agency across boundaries of role, race, class language and educational background’ (p. 357), and describe the process by which parents and teachers ultimately worked together as ‘solidarities centred around difference and interdependence, rather than surface notions of sameness or temporary interest convergences’ (p. 358). The initiative of co-constructing some school dimensions in common seemed to have a profound effect on the parents involved and on at least some of the teachers. It does however raise questions as to who the small group of parents was understood as representing, and what different agendas may arise from different parental groupings. It is important as well to acknowledge and address the imbalance in educational knowledge between teachers and parents in order to create real formal spaces of co-operation and commoning. Warren et al. [64] explain the following:

‘Rather than starting with an activity—for example, getting parents to attend a math night—this approach starts with relationships that create conversations to give parents an opportunity to articulate their own concerns. Rather than having the school set the agenda or the activities, we have highlighted the value of providing parents with opportunities to take leadership in setting a joint agenda. Rather than top-down communication from educator to parent, a relational approach creates opportunity for meaningful conversation and mutual learning across the lines that divide our urban schools from the communities they serve’ (p. 2245).

Approaches such as ‘funds of knowledge’ (‘bodies of knowledge and skills that are essential for the well-being of an entire household’) and ‘funds of identity’ (the result of actively using these funds in order to define themselves) have been carried out since the 1980s using policies like visits to students’ homes; working and valuing the knowledge, culture, religion, and traditions of families; and including and contextualising the school curriculum using all these resources in order to promote conviviality [65,66].

(b)

Connecting local families

The other set of key relationships to consider in order to promote conviviality and schools as common sites of shared living is that between parents themselves. We argue here, following Vincent et al. [41], that schools could offer a shared space for different families to meet and mix, and one to which all families who have children at the school can claim as a common place in which they have an interest. As one parent participant in Price’s study said [67] (p. 27) ‘It’s not like standing next to someone on a train, you know you have a child in common and an institution in common’. This is an institutional space that can offer the prompt for developing a ‘habit of negotiating multiplicity’ [47], a conviviality, to make schools invented spaces. As we argue in the paper, if we are to build schools as common places that are able to produce diverse and unequal relationships between parents and teachers and between parents, we need to reject substantive, stable, and homogeneous identities as the point of departure.

It is important to recognise here the presence of ambivalence about interaction and engagement with ‘the other’ and the complex ‘entanglements of division and inclusion’ [60] (p. 414), but these exist alongside reflexivity and internal conversations as individuals negotiate ‘differentiated and stratified social worlds’. Samanani [51] (p. 4) pinpoints one of the main ideas of the paper: the need to abandon the model of schools as communities composed of substantive cultural identities and to promote formal models, patterns, practices, attitudes, and mechanisms orientated to and for the common good.

5. Conclusions

To conclude, schools in superdiverse locations have potential as institutional spaces prompting the development of a ‘habit of negotiating multiplicity’ [47], a recognition by diverse people that the school is an educational commons in which all hold a legitimate interest; that schools have potential as sites to take that understanding forward, to create invented spaces. I believe small steps can be made towards understanding commoning—where parents develop their own voices and move towards debating issues of importance to the functioning of the school, both perceiving themselves and being perceived as having voices equal to those of the teaching staff, and as having different but also valuable knowledge. The plurilingual projects in Spain show that an education policy orientated to the construction of schools as commons has the potential to overcome traditional school tenets and practices derived from multicultural, intercultural, or civic integration models. However, I recognise that exercising conviviality and identifying schools (or leisure time, as Essomba et al. [68] propose) as educational commons, as a shared and non-substantive site for learning where difference and points of commonality amongst all members of the school commons are acknowledged, requires a radical departure from how schools currently operate. Such a rethinking of the role of schools might seem difficult in this age, where the macro-context of neoliberal hegemony shapes our general political, economic, and social contexts and understandings and, more specifically, shapes school priorities.

Nevertheless, I finish by reiterating the argument that even small steps towards seeing schools as resources in common, as places of formal conviviality away from “the circle of we”, as sites where different people have legitimate interests and voices, and where people interact competently across difference even in quotidian interactions, can be powerful in delivering a lived experience which counters far-right narratives of division, minority assimilation, and desired segregation. An experience of co-constructing schools as invented spaces, as convivial places, as an educational commons in superdiverse spaces and times based on the relational paradigm [69].