IN-PERSON MADRID FOCUS ON PEDAGOGY. SECTION B

Abstract

Socio-cultural organisations are vital sites of non-formal education, particularly through participatory arts activities. Within contexts shaped by forced migration, crisis, and social transformation, such community arts activation supports social cohesion. Creative arts educators and practitioners enable intercultural learning, inclusion, and possibility thinking through embodied and collaborative pedagogical practices. How are digital technologies and artificial intelligence currently integrated into these socialised learning environments? This paper presents the findings of a digital ethnography within nine organisations working with dance, drama, and music in Cambodia, Italy, Hungary, Greece, Papua New Guinea, Lebanon, the UK, Serbia, and Slovakia. As part of the Horizon Europe project INTRACOMP, this paper introduces the CoDiWo/WoDiPro Framework as a conceptual tool for analysing how digital technologies operate across six key domains of non-formal education practice: Communication, Dissemination, Workshopping/Worldbuilding, Discovery, and Production. Using this framework, we examined how non-formal arts educators navigate technological opportunities, constraints, and tensions as they design and facilitate learning experiences. Our findings show that digital technologies are not neutral tools but actively reconfigure relationships, modes of participation, and conditions for learning. We argue that educators in socio-cultural organisations must move beyond instrumental uses of technology toward creative and workshopping practices that can sustain inclusive, creative, and intercultural learning in digitally mediated environments. This paper calls for a shift in how non-formal education understands and integrates digital technologies within arts-based practice.