It’s over. It’s hard to believe, but our first conference is over. I got involved with EUDEC later than some – EUDEC had its first beginning about two years ago, and I only moved to Leipzig and got involved late last year. But I’m very glad I had the opportunity to take part in this, and the conference was nothing short of amazing.

Over those ten days, 389 people attended the conference. 150 were only there for the public session, but 239 came for the full conference. Approximately 22% of attendees were school students or younger and 25% were university students.

We had hoped some of the attendees would post to the blog during the conference, but we were all busy having a great time. Over the conference, we had dozens and dozens of workshops and activities, and the rest of the time we were busy getting to know new people, or hanging out with people we already knew, or working on different projects.

I hope to write a few more posts about the conference over the coming days, and if anyone else would like to contribute please let me know (posting a comment here would be a fine way to do so.)

Also, it would be great if everyone would leave a comment about one great experience from EUDEC 2008.

-Michael S.,
whose name-tag was worth 6 points

The first ever EUDEC conference is set to start today. Over 230 people from all over Europe (plus Australia, Israel, the United States and Taiwan) are on their way to Leipzig. Several are here already. We will update the blog several times during the conference with pictures and reports. Check back here over the next ten days!

Also, if you prefer Deutsch, notice the new German EUDEC Blog: link

With over 200 registrants for the full conference — and counting — the registration deadline is getting very close. If you have not registered for the conference, you have one week left until July 10, our final deadline. After that date we cannot take any new registrations. click here for the conference registration page

This week Leonard spent a few days in Leipzig, and we had a few meetings with him.

Leonard Turton was one of the people who first thought up the ideas that later became EUDEC (both the Conference and the Community). He is vice-Chairman of the EUDEC Council, and a teacher at Summerhill School in England. While in Leipzig, he gave a talk and a presentation at the student-run seminar on democratic education in the University of Leipzig. The main theme of his presentation was the history of democratic education, and the fact that it is not a progressive new idea at all. He also told the story of how he started a free school in Canada in 1971, how he later started a fad of democratic classrooms in a Canadian state school, and how his classroom at Summerhill works.

Leonard’s visit was a good opportunity to get Conference planning and Council work done. He attended the planning team’s meeting and some of us got together the next day to work out some of the details of the upcoming EUDECommunity website. We hope the site will launch within a few months. The following day, Leslie and I met with Leonard to work out some more details of the website content and to brainstorm about some of the tasks and questions before the Council right now. Much of the Council’s work for the next months will be in preparation for the conference. The Council is trying out different online solutions to enable closer cooperation and good flows of work and information among the council members, who are located in six different places in three different countries.

Registration for EUDEC 2008 Leipzig is now open.

After hours of discussion and dozens of revisions, the online registration forms are finally up. They can be found on the EUDEC’08 website, here: link

If you’re coming for the full ten-day conference, you might want to sign up quickly – the fees are significantly reduced if you register by 30 April.

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)

From the EUDEC2008 Website:

The EUDEC 2008 planning committee invites abstracts for lectures, presentations and workshops to be offered during the public session of the conference on 31 July and 1 August. Presenters planning to attend Part A (democratic school session) of the conference will also have the opportunity to offer their workshops in the context of open schedule.

Lectures and presentations should be no longer than 30 minutes to allow time for discussion. If you are unable to present in English or German, please bring someone who can translate into one of these languages. The subject and language of the presentations should be appropriate for a mixed-age audience (young people and adults).

The deadline for abstracts is March 31.

Just over a week ago, we received notification that EUDEC 2008 has been granted recognition as an Official Project for the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development by the German UNESCO commission.

This is very good news for us. Having a big name like UNESCO associated with this conference gives us a lot of credibility and prestige. It’s an honor to be associated with such an organization.

Hello and welcome to the EUDEC Blog. This blog is used by the EUDEC Conference team for news and updates about the upcoming conference. During and after the conference it will also be used for reports and accounts of the conference by us and by others.

For those who are not familiar with EUDEC, EUDEC is short for European Democratic Education Conference. It is a new conference, inspired by the international IDEC, that seeks to promote democratic education in Europe. The first conference will take place in Leipzig, Germany, July 25 to August 3, and will comprise of an intensive conference of democratic schools and two days of public sessions, open to all interested persons.

This blog will be updated as more information becomes available.