Thinking in (the) Common: COMOOC experience as a third space to create community from education and the arts

Abstract

What can we think, do, research, create, play, and activate in common? This question - composed of different questions - is the trigger for a praxis that is circumscribed in the methodological framework of educational action-research and within the context of the City College of New York (New York, USA, October 2023). An action that brought together an international group of researchers concerned with creativity, teacher training, the arts and pedagogy. This action gathered an international group of thirteen professionals in the arts, education and social and community research concerned with creativity, teacher training, the arts and pedagogy, from institutions in the United States, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Spain. The proposal is named COMOOC and responds to unfolding concepts and that, in different languages and in a dynamic way, play with ideas such as community, creativity, openness and hybridization of digital and non-digital spaces. This exercise maintains connections with theories of the commons, dialogic education, and the experience of third educational spaces. The results of this experimental gathering allowed participants to model community teaching and enter into cross-disciplinary conversations and their intersectional treatment. As part of the conclusions, the construction of this third educational space has implied an awareness of collective relations where doing and thinking -from and for- the commons is a transversal axis of the pedagogical research action.