European school traditions...

On Monday we were supposed to meet Tove Heidemann. But something was wrong in the schedule so we got an extra hour to get rid of our morning fatigue. Which was to be honest not the worst idea. But finally we started into our lecture about different European school traditions with learning about the European Commission's goal to indicate European core values and a common history and culture. On the other hand we learned about historical and geographical borderlines, e.g. the "limes" (lat.: borderline farest away from Rome) along the Rhine and the Danube, deviding Europe into a northern and a southern part. We came across differences in culture, society, religion, and so on. As these were more generalized assumptions we afterwards turned towards the rather local level, i.e. the schools in the different countries. Tove presented us the theory of Edgar Schein who seperated the organization of school culture into three levels:

Level 1: Artefacts (what you can observe): e.g. appearance, equipment, cantine, subjects, interaction, behaviour
Level 2: Exposed values (what you can explain): e.g. rationalities, reasons for organization, aims
Level 3: Basic assumptions (what you cannot observe / explain): e.g. interpretations of values and artefacts, main tasks, how is "learning" looked upon

After this rather theoretical part we made a short journey to France, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Belgium (encyclopedic approach), Great Britain (humanistic approach) and Germany, The Natherlands and Scandinavia (naturalistic approach). The data presented was taken from the book "Britain and a single market Europe" by Martin McLean but unfortunately almost 20 years old. Therefor it has to be critically questioned whether these data is still valid today or whether things have changed. The data was as follows:

encyclopedic: Uniformity (knowledge about as many issues as possible, centralized curriculum and tests), rationality (no emotions, logical way of thinking, France, science, history and philosophy), elitism (competition rather than cooperation, universities and grand ecoles)

humanistic: high moral standard (ideal of the gentleman, empathy, sense of duty, brotherhood), individualism (close contact between teachers and students, individual learning speed), specialisation (choice of 2-3 subjects to focus on at the age of 16)

naturalistic: community needs (streaming of pupils, every job has its function and own dignity, hard work, economical behaviour), imitating of parents' way of socialising (parents have much influence, learning by imitation, process as important as product, skills-oriented)

Many of those values and strategies may have disappeared or been altered over the years. Thus it's difficult to actually work with this data. But nevertheless it indicates that there have been differences between countries and their concepts of education. In how far these differences still exist could be an interesting topic to do research in.

A very controversial question came up towards the end of our meeting: there are schools for pupils with special needs in Denmark but no (or very few) schools for highly gifted pupils. What is the reason for that? Do not pupils with special talents or above average intelligence also deserve an adequate education? We again mentioned the "jante" law - which I personally think to be a questionable value after reading the ten rules - but is it a sufficient explanation to "suppress" talent? In my opinion talent should be advanced. Not to educate a superior elite of pupils but to help gifted pupils to use their talents to support and improve the society and to become socially capable citizens.

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.

Danish school life...

We started our third week on Monday with a recapitulation of our school visits during the first week. We collected the results of our observations and tried to make up generalized predications about the Danish school system. The keywords we listed were: freedom, feeling like at home, few rules, well equiped schools, many different ways to learn, little structure. Afterwards our teacher Torbjørn Ydegård tried to explain the reasons for certain aspects and provided us an insight into the Danish educational system. For example we talked about problematic pupils, the hidden curriculum and private schools. Torbjørn explained to us the importance of the work of Michel Foucault (e.g. "Discipline & Punish: The birth of the prison") for the Danish school system. "Michel Foucault is best known for his critical studies of various social intitutions, most notably psychiatry, medicine, the human sciences, and the prison system [which he related to the educational system], as well as for his work on the history of human sexuality. Foucault's work on power, and the relationships among power, knowledge, and discourse, has been widely discussed and applied." ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault )

The second discussion topic was related to our observation of lacking structure in the lessons. We were introduced to the so called "hidden curriculum" which is quite important for Danish teachers. The focus is more on achieving learning strategies and competences than on data knowledge in the subjects. The idea was not new to me because I learned something similar in Germany. We call it "educational standards", "curriculum framework" or "key competences". What these concepts have in common is the increased importance of skills and competences in addition to knowledge in the subjects.

Torbjørn concluded our excursion to the Danish educational system with a short presentation about Danish private schools. The most striking aspect here was the possibility for parents to found a private school with - compared to our countries - little obligations. Another important point was the form of financing: Private schools get their benefits directly from the government whereas public schools are paid by the communities.

On Tuesday we continued our discussion about school systems with Torbjørn. He started off with presenting us two theoretical approaches concerning education: the interconnected didactical categories (ability, framework, aims and goals, content, methods, evaluation) are often refered to in the Danish educational system. The main focus is on the abilities the pupils should develop in school. It is often connected to Immanuel Kant ("All the preparations of reason, therefore, in what may be called pure philosophy, are in reality directed to those three problems only [God, the soul, and freedom]. However, these three elements in themselves still hold independent, proportional, objective weight individually. Moreover, in a collective relational context; namely, to know what ought to be done: if the will is free, if there is a God, and if there is a future world. As this concerns our actions with reference to the highest aims of life, we see that the ultimate intention of nature in her wise provision was really, in the constitution of our reason, directed to moral interests only."(Critique of pure reason, 1781)) and emphasizes the importance of using your reason.

This theory was also part of the approach by the German Wolfgang Klafki. Klafki furnished the term "Bildung" as related to autonomy (individual-related) and democracy / solidarity (society-related). In his approach the main focus in education is on the aims and goals.

The second theory by the Norwegian Erik J. Dale extracts the role of the teacher from the network of didactical categories. It focuses on the competences of teachers and classifies three categories: C1: the teacher standing in front of the class, C2: the teacher thinking about teaching / planing the lessons, C3: the teacher communicating about didactics / developing theories. According to Dale unfortunately most teachers remain stuck in the first two categories. He assumes that teachers lose their autonomy without participating in C3. Furthermore he advises against the potential danger of centralized top to bottom regulations of schools by the government.

The remaining time we prepared our next school excursion in pairs. I worked together with Charlotte and we decided to split up our observation interests into pupil's and teacher's actions and behaviour.

In conclusion I would say that I learned a lot about the differences in the educational systems of Denmark and Germany (or at least Schleswig-Holstein). Especially I appreciated the reference to Klafki whose approaches are often refered to in my home university. Thus I could recapitulate my knowledge and add new aspects about educational theories.