Learners' Involvement in Governing Common Didactic Resources: an Essential Challenge for their Democratic Citizenship Training

To be published in September 2025

Abstract

The issue of empowering learners and giving them a sense of responsibility in the "governance" of shared learning resources -i.e., in the research, selection, organization and use of their own cultural, language and methodological learning resources- has become unavoidable for three converging reasons: (1) the existence of the Web and AI programs, which enable learners not only to access a large number of resources, but to produce new ones themselves; (2) the goal of training learners for democratic citizenship, which includes "information literacy" competence (3) the implementation of the Social Action-Oriented Approach (SAOA), whose reference pedagogical model, namely project pedagogy, implies that actors rely on relevant documentation managed by themselves. The article presents concrete proposals for activities to train learners in the autonomous governance of their didactic resources, followed by four conditions for the success of this training project, which will enable teachers to eventually go further in their practices of empowering their learners: (1) create institutions within the classroom; (2) maintain dynamic compatibility with the environment; (3) optimize the cost-benefit ratio; (4) gradually the aim for the overall pedagogical coherence, in which project pedagogy, group pedagogy, differentiated pedagogy, contract pedagogy and the reflective approach are closely interlinked. This contribution is inspired by the rules of governance for self-managed enterprises developed by Elinor Ostrom from the research that won her the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009, and by the historical experiences of self-management pedagogies. An ancillary goal of this article is to show that we now need to evolve the academic norms of academic research writing by taking AI programs into account there, in the form, for example, of reproductions of answers to queries, or suggestions of queries for readers to test.