The EUDEC Blog

Leslie, our able Conference Coordinator, suggested I post this report by David French on the conference on democratic education that took place in Łódź, Poland in November. Thanks, Leslie!

Hopefully, this will be the first of many posts related to EUDEC – the European Democratic Education Community – the network now forming, whose Mission Statement reads:

The European Democratic Education Community (EUDEC) seeks to promote and support democratic education across Europe. It is working to become recognised as the foremost advisory organisation for schools and organisations seeking to develop democracy in education, and as the foremost connective network between schools practicing democracy in Europe. It will provide support to schools and startup initiatives, education professionals, parents, pupils and students, and facilitate networking between them.

This blog may be for the EUDEConference, but we’ll make sure to post about other noteworthy EUDECommunity events.

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WSP Teacher Training College in Lodz, Poland hosted a conference entitled Democratic Education in the World on 10-11 November 2007. It was organized by professor Boguslaw Sliwerski, the Rector of WSP and David French.

The idea for this conference came from the meetings that Leonard Turton (of Summerhill) and David had with Polish educators in Lodz in August 2006. Leonard had talked about the plans for EUDEC and had heard about Polish democratic education initiatives past and present. At that meeting it was planned to organize a Polish conference in 2007.

About 100 people took part in the conference. Polish participants were mainly involved in education, although relatively few were actively involved in democratic education initiatives. There was also a significant group of Polish parents engaged in home education, either already educating their children at home or planning to in the future.

There was a good representation of people from the European democratic education community. They included Leonard and three current Summerhill students: Mickey Endo, Chae-eun Park and Anna Ramm; Rachel Roberts, former Sands student, who now works for ESSA in England; Leslie Ocker and Henrik Ebenbeck of the Leipzig Free School; Eyal Ram of the Kibbutzim College for Education and Institute for Democratic Education, Israel; Toralf Franke-Viezens from the Ting School in Berlin and Rikke Knudsen formerly of Naestved Free School in Denmark, and now home-schooling her children.

Apart from the Polish participants there was also a small representation of Slovak and Czech educators, including Lenka Vavrekova and Jaroslav Balvin who work to improve the educational chances of Roma children in Slovakia.

Leonard opened the conference with a talk about his “Journey through Democratic Education”; Eyal presented a vision of democratic education and talked about his work with teacher training students. The four students of free schools took part in a question and answer session about their experiences of democratic education. Rachel described the work ESSA does in English state schools with student voice. She was joined on stage by Pawel Oruba, a school student who was active in the now defunct Polish Students Initiative, a grass-roots students organization which campaigned for more freedom in Polish education.

There were presentations by Polish participants about various issues connected with education in schools. Representatives of some Polish alternative schools gave presentations about their schools.

European Democratic Education Community representatives talked about EUDEC and the plans for the conference in Leipzig in 2008, and encouraged the participants to take part in the conference.

On Sunday the program was open schedule and there was a range of topics to choose from.

The languages of the conference were English and Polish, which meant that almost every presentation was translated either from Polish into English or vice versa.

Although compared to other European countries Poland has its fair share of democratic schools and influential educators, not all such schools were represented at the conference, which was a shame.

After the conference, on the Monday, the Summerhill delegation and David visited High School 44, which had functioned as a democratic school at the beginning of the 1990s. The government took away its right to be an experimental school after a few years, although they retained, for example, a school council, although with very limited competences. We first spoke to the school’s director who talked about his plans for the future and hopes of maintaining contacts with Summerhill. Afterwards we took part in a meeting with the school’s class representatives. They learnt something about how Summerhill functions and talked about how democracy was not being encouraged at their school at the present time.

Magda Trzaskala, who works as a psychologist at the School 44, plans to come to both the EUDEC February planning meeting and the summer conference with students from the school.

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Apparently, videos and photos from the conference can be found on this blog: link (Polish)