Amsterdam, we all know it as a touristy city, famous for its tolerant and open minded atmosphere and attractive to all those who want to celebrate freedom. It was weird at first to arrive here for work but it might not come as a surprise that we came here together for the first time. There is something very idiosyncratic about the way the Netherlands deals with democracy and education. Freedom, open communication and responsibility are essential to a Dutch upbringing, something we as fellow Europeans can definitely learn from. In this way our meeting in Amsterdam was not only by its content but also by its context about our project’s goals: promoting European democracy in the classroom.
We were kindly invited to come to one of our partner schools where Tuba showed us around at first. ALASCA is a rather new school (since about 7 years) with a groundbreaking view on education. The curriculum and didactics are firmly rooted in the tradition of the ‘liberal arts and sciences’. Students no longer take individual subjects but they sign up for different modules where the different subject’s goals are offered in an integrated class. These didactics are reflected by the open architecture. The school is built around different ‘leerpleinen’ (learning squares), meeting spots for students to discuss and work on their tasks. Around these ‘leerpleinen’ one can find the classrooms, which can be clearly seen from the ‘leerpleinen’, further promoting transparency. Students have two classes a day and one class can take up to two hours and a half. One class is about 50 students but students can choose whether they want to follow the teacher’s pace in the classroom or their own pace in the ‘leerpleinen’. Two co-teaching teachers take up the role in one of the two environments.
It is definitely a new and refreshing way of approaching 21st-century education and only one step removed from what we learned in the masterclass on Strength-based Learning. The masterclass was taught by Karel Moons and Melanie Hall, two researchers connected to UCLL Leuven, who developed a type of didactics specifically tailored for a class with a great deal of cultural, intellectual and linguistic diversity. Originally made for the migrant classes in Flemish education (www.teachmi.eu), the principles of the masterclass strongly resembled the principles of our project and our current 21st-century classroom. The concepts from Strength-Based Learning depart from a competence-based view on didactics, where students proceed from one step to the next stop in order to achieve some goals, but rather focuses on and gives responsibility to the student’s strengths and abilities. It is partly up to the student to decide what he is or is not able to do. Strength-based Learning is also firmly rooted in the traditions of cooperative learning. Students are given responsibility, with guidance from their teacher, to choose how they go about performing the tasks. They have to communicate and collaborate with fellow students. The masterclass on Strength-Based Learning not only provides us teachers with a way to deal with the huge diversity in our 21st-century classrooms, but also gives us a metadidactic way of incorporating democratic values such as communication, opinion-making and compromising in our teaching methods.
After a good night’s sleep at the Volkshotel, we met up once again in ALASCA. This time we had a virtual lecture by prof. dr. Gerhard Roth from the University of Bremen planned. Prof. dr. Roth specializes in the neurological development of children and how this influences a child’s behaviour and social development. We were very curious about the insights prof. Roth could give us about the impact we could still have on student’s behaviour towards a more democratic attitude. Research has shown that most of a child’s social development already happens before they go to primary school. It is especially in this timeframe that we as a society have the most impact on a child’s future democratic behaviour. Of course, nothing is quite so deterministic and there are still plenty of options to deal with students with a more negative attitude. It was interesting to see what advice neurology could give us on classroom management and more specifically on how to approach students with a negative attitude. It has been shown that it is very important for teachers to come across as ‘trustworthy’ and true to democratic values right from the start of teaching a group of adolescents. Much of our behaviour is influenced by non-verbal and paraverbal communication, something we cannot control consciously. A teacher’s job is therefore not only one of skillful command of their subject, but also of a human and pedagogic component about being the change and leading by example in order to promote democratic values with their students.
A large component of our project is our collaboration with our for-profit partner iVox. We met up with Hans, the CEO of iVox, who kindly guided us through brainstorming the content of our little app. We discussed different types of questions and methods of achieving specific results. In the end we discussed the different questions we could possibly ask.
The Amsterdam meeting was the necessary follow-up for our kick-off meeting. It showed us the what and how of teaching our project and it strengthened the bonds between the different parties involved. Thank you very much for your support and cooperation.
