digging deeper...

On Thursday we met Torbjørn again and evaluated about our experiences and observations at the Hoptrup efterskole on Monday. We all had recognized the freedom of the pupils, the friendly relationship between teachers and pupils and the homelike atmosphere in the school. Afterwards Torbjørn introduced us to the theoretical approach towards planing a curriculum by Alistair Ross. Ross distinguishes between three different ways of planing a curriculum:

1. classical humanist academic way (content and subjects in focus, teacher as instructor)
2. utilitalian way (objectives in focus, teacher as guide)
3. progressive way (process in focus, teacher as equal partner)

How intensively these ways are followed or if there are mixtures in between the ways differs from country to country. Our task was it then to make up tree diagrams about our own educational systems and the Danish (according to our observations and what we've learned so far) one. These are the tree diagrams I came up with:








We presented our results to each other and concluded that there are approaches in all countries to work more learner-centred. We also talked about the political dimensions of this paradigm and the relationships between the three ways.

The second part of the lesson was about citizenship again. Torbjørn presented the book "The open society and its enenmies" by Karl Popper to us. Popper deals in his book indirectly with the threats to society like nationalism and communism. He uses the works of Plato about collectivism and altruism on the one and individualism and egoism on the other hand. But unlike Plato he allows cross-connections between these expressions and denotes them with political attributes.

In a second step we added extreme formations of these political/social ideas which are located somehow outside the society.

For me it was interesting to hear that even Plato dealed with the problem of threats to a society (so it's not a modern phenomenon at all) and that political attributes like "right" or "left" just refer to the historical distribution of the members of parliament seen from the speaker's perspective.

At the end we tried to apply Poppers diagram to the different ways of planing a curriculum. Here the circle closed.