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In the Norwegian educational context, increased emphasis on the interdisciplinary themes, democracy and citizenship, sustainable development, and health and well-being has strengthened expectations that schools support students’ engagement with complex societal issues across subjects. This places dialogue, collaboration, and collective meaning-making at the centre of democratic participation. While previous research has shown how dialogue can be deliberately designed for and supported in classrooms, less attention has been paid to what happens when such designs unfold in practice across contexts involving both schools and external actors.
This paper reports on a qualitative case study from a collaborative project involving a lower secondary school, a public library, and researchers. The aim was to explore ways of engaging young people more actively in local sustainability-related issues. Through a joint workshop, the partners co-created a teaching design that was implemented over one semester through classroom activities and field-based work at the library. Students were invited to explore the library as a community space and develop proposals for how it could become more relevant to young people. Data consist of video recordings from the design workshop, field observations, and interviews with participants from the school and library. The analysis draws on reflexive thematic analysis and activity theory, conceptualising the teaching design as the object of the activity.
The findings show that the design initially generated strong engagement among both students and teachers. Students developed many ideas and, according to teachers, more students participated than in ordinary classroom activities. At the same time, the design was interpreted differently in practice by the participants. As the work progressed, the design was gradually reshaped in relation to school expectations of assessment, progression, and completion. This narrowed the scope of the exploration, reduced students’ sense of ownership, and undermined the original ambition to carry students’ proposals forward in the library. Instead, the design became a basis for reflection on future collaboration.
The study empirically demonstrates the central challenges in designing for democratic participation, namely, creating authentic opportunities for dialogue while also sustaining them across phases, contexts, and institutional demands.