The principles and pedagogical practices informing this conceptual framework are further elaborated in the project handbook. Here we provide the conceptual and theoretical commitments informing The Enquiring Classroom project and indicate how these have shaped the nature of the pedagogical and reflective exercises proposed in the handbook.
Questions of integration, cohesion, identity, democracy and belonging are at the forefront of both European educational and political discourses. Sometimes we are told that multiculturalism is a failed experiment, yet the acknowledgement and cultivation of diversity has been and remains at the heart of the European project and the very fact that the ‘other’ exists is both presupposed and valued in pluralistic societies. Yet, too often, extremes of secularist, political, and religious beliefs alike can see one another as sharing no common ground or values, often presupposing divisions and thus failing to locate those beliefs and values that they share, in principle, even if they may interpret them differently. How might we begin to re-imagine the commons, publics, and pluralism in educational spaces by approaching questions of values through a different set of lenses and commitments?