Decolonising Education in Migration: Art-Based and Participatory Pathways for Adult Migrants in the PRISCILA Project

International literature highlights the structural limitations of top-down approaches in migration policies and inclusion projects. Although these approaches claim to be responsive to migrants’ needs, they often reproduce Eurocentric logics and colonial power dynamics (Camara, 2025). As a result, migrants are frequently positioned as passive recipients of interventions, rather than recognised as active agents in shaping their own educational and social inclusion pathways. This misrecognition distorts the understanding of their personal, relational, and contextual needs. In a global context marked by deepening inequalities and tensions, there is a need to promote pedagogical frameworks that move beyond such logics, grounding action in the lived experiences of adult migrants and their active participation. In line with this, the European project PRISCILA – Fostering Personal, Intercultural, Social, and Citizenship Competences for Lifelong Learning to Empower Adult Migrant Learners explored an art-based, participatory methodology as a potential response, foregrounding migrants’ narratives, languages, and knowledge (Mouffe, 2007; Isin & Nielsen, 2008; Mazzara, 2019). Within a non-formal education framework (McCoshan et al., 2020; Almeida & Morais, 2024), methods and performing arts such as Theatre of the Oppressed, Spatial Assemblage, Deep Democracy, and Critical Incident were used to co-design pilot pathways aimed at fostering key lifelong learning competences. By integrating postcolonial and intercultural perspectives (Spivak G., 1988; Dervin F., 2016), the project highlights the transformative potential of participatory practices and shows how decolonial approaches can unsettle Eurocentric knowledge hierarchies, creating pedagogical spaces where migrants become authors and protagonists of their own learning trajectories.