Kopernikus School: Dialogue and Respect for a Democratic Life

Abstract

Educating for democracy requires educating in democracy. As part of a pedagogical approach inspired by the Jenaplan model, Kopernikus School works daily on fostering dialogue, attentively listening; the respect and recognition of the value of each other; and being relevant to their community by collaborating with other schools and neighbors through both structured and non-structured spaces and experiences that combined, shape the life at the school.

Introduction

In education, some things can only be learned through lived experience. One of them is to learn to live with others in a democratic way. Democracy and school are interdependent. The school must be a model for the community it educates and for which it educates. It must be a place where children and young people feel that they are welcome, that they are needed, and that they matter. It must instill confidence in the idea that the good life they aspire to is attainable. Part of this good life is to understand that differences and diversity are assets, that the weak need to be protected, and that the rules and values that apply and are established together set limits to the selfishness of individuals.

Democratic education also encompasses experiences such as celebrating together, traveling together, spending leisure time together, working together, and finding one’s place in society. The values that a school aims for should be more than class or a subject. Independence and responsibility, solidarity and helpfulness, and empathy, affection, and compassion must be lived in everyday life. The future of civil society depends on whether the younger generation adopts its cultural traditions and values, including learning to understand and respect other cultures.

Where We Come From

Kopernikus School (www.kopernikus.cl) is a private school located in Frutillar, Chile, a little town of 20,000 habitants, a thousand kilometers south from the capital city, Santiago. The town is dominated by the scenic views of the volcanoes, the Llanquihue Lake, the natural landscape, and by Teatro del Lago, one of the largest and most innovative theaters in the country. A total of 4291 students in Frutillar attend in 27 schools (12 public, 12 charter, and 3 private schools). As of 2022, Kopernikus School hosts 340 students from two to eighteen years old in 16 multi-age classrooms. Currently, Kopernikus does not implement any selection process based on academic achievements, family background, or personal characteristics. Every year we make important efforts to expand the grants we offer to the local community as well as to improve the quality of our special needs program.

The school was founded in 2014 by Nicola Schiess, a Chilean philanthropist that has promoted education, music, and innovation in this small town, the northern point of the Chilean Patagonia. Although Nicola did not come from an educational background, she was convinced that the new education should focus on the singularity of each person, creativity, and the connection with the world. To develop these ideas, she and the team that founded the school visited several schools in Europe, each one following different approaches and methodologies.

In Jenaplan she discovered exactly what she was looking for: a pedagogical framework focused on the experience of each child and open to innovative ways of teaching, where creativity and inter-personal respect are essential for students to flourish. With the help of a teacher and the former principal of Rosenmaar School in Cologne, Germany, Kopernikus School started the development and adaptation of Jenaplan to its Chilean context. “There is no Jenaplan school just like another Jenaplan school” states a common phrase among schools that identify themselves with this pedagogical framework, because each school has to respond to their own environment and to the dynamic conditions of the society in which they belong.

About Jenaplan

Jenaplan was developed in the 1920s in the city of Jena by Peter Petersen who was the head of the Department of Education at the University of Jena. Between 1960 and 1990 the pedagogical framework has been especially promoted and renewed in the Netherlands (Velthausz & Winters, 2014). There are more than 250 Jenaplan schools in the world, most of them in the Netherlands and Germany.

Jenaplan schools operate according to twenty principles written in cooperation with and for the Jenaplan Association of the Netherlands by Kees Both and Kees Vreugdenhil in 1992 (NJPV, 2022). These principles are also accepted by the German Jenaplan Society. There are five principles that define the concept of the human being for Jenaplan, five principles that define the vision of society, and ten principles regarding schools to act accordingly to the vision of humans and society.

About People

• 1. Every person is unique: there are no two persons alike. That is why every child and every adult has an irreplaceable value.

• 2. Every human being has the right to develop their own identity. This is characterized by independence, critical awareness, creativity, and a focus on social justice. Race, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, social environment, religion, worldview, or disability should make no difference.

• 3. Every human being needs personal relationships to develop their own identity: with other people; with the sensory reality of nature and culture; with the reality that cannot be experienced by the senses.

• 4. Every human being is recognized as a whole person and, where possible, approached and addressed as such.

• 5. Every human being is recognized as a carrier and innovator of culture and as such approached and addressed as much as possible.

About Society

• 6. People must work toward a society that respects everyone’s irreplaceable value.

• 7. People must work toward a society that offers space and incentives for everyone’s identity development.

• 8. People must work toward a society in which differences and changes are dealt with fairly, peacefully, and constructively.

• 9. People must work toward a society that manages the earth and world with respect and care.

• 10. People must work toward a society that uses natural and cultural resources responsibly for future generations.

About the School

• 11. The school is a relatively autonomous, cooperative organization of those involved. It influences society and is influenced by it.

• 12. At school, adults have the task of transforming the aforementioned principles about people and society into starting point of their pedagogical actions.

• 13. In the school, subject matter is derived both from the children’s world and experiences, and from the cultural goods, which are regarded in society as important means for the development of the person and society outlined here.

• 14. In the school, education is carried out in pedagogical situations and with the help of pedagogical tools.

• 15. In the school, education is shaped by a rhythmic alternation of the basic activities of speaking, playing, working, and celebrating.

• 16. In the school there is a predominantly heterogeneous grouping of children, according to age and level of development, in order to stimulate learning from and caring for each other.

• 17. In the school, independent play and learning are alternated and complemented by guided and supervised learning. The latter is explicitly aimed at raising the levels. In all this, the children’s initiatives play a significant role.

• 18. In the school, world studies are central and are based on experiencing, discovering, and researching.

• 19. In the school, behavioral and performance assessment of a child takes place as much as possible based on the child’s developmental history and in consultation with the child.

• 20. In the school, changes and improvements are a never-ending process. This process is driven by a consistent interaction between acting and thinking.

The basic forms of education according to the Jenaplan approach are as follows:

• Work—It is constituted by the formal and nonformal teaching-learning moments and by the individual work the students do while learning to be responsible and autonomous.

• Dialogue—We make ourselves heard and listen to each other in a respectful environment, where we can share, reflect, plan, assess opportunities, discuss challenges, propose solutions, etc.

• Play—Through play we recognize each other and process our own experiences.

• Celebration—In different times and forms, celebrations are instances to strengthen our own community and the sense of belonging.

These basic forms of education are different ways in which students can discover who they are, explore the world, and express themselves by being aware of the local and wider community they are part of. Based on Jenaplan’s basic forms of education and principles, at Kopernikus School we have been working toward a democratic education. Often, people confuse democratic education with a place where every decision has to be voted by all, or as an organization with no authority roles to play. We see democratic education as one that teaches students to understand that they have an active role in building a school in which everyone’s inalienable value and dignity have to be respected.

We know that in education there are thousands of beautiful frameworks like Jenaplan. We think that the potential for innovation is not in continuing to create new frameworks. When we think about democratic education, we go back to ideas first written at least a century ago. For us, the potential for innovation lies at the core of the consistent and systematic implementation and improvement of these ideas. Today, high-quality implementation is scarcer than good ideas.

Although it will not be possible to fully transmit spirit and the culture of Kopernikus School in this chapter, we will share a set of practices and actions that we think can contribute to the conversation on how to develop democratic schools that this book is starting.

Multi-age Classrooms

All of our 340 students attend multi-age classrooms that aim to be a space for learning and community life to happen. Just like in real life, these classrooms gather students of different ages, interests, and occupations. This is not common for urban schools in Chile, where the traditional structure of age grouping has hardly ever been challenged. Our students seem to understand why for us multi-age classrooms reinforce our expectation to deliver a democratic education.

At the beginning, I didn’t really understand the need to combine 9th and 10th grade in one classroom, but as the months went by, I realized how much I learned thanks to it. The multi-age gave me many friendships and taught me to be a better leader and more inclusive person, since being of the older generation in the class made me notice a slight difference in terms of leadership. It also helped me to realize that it is not necessary to always be restricted to my age group and that was something I had very normalized,

indicates Verena Mies from 10th grade. Educating in multi-age classrooms is a strong principle for our pedagogical model, but it hasn’t been a smooth path to explore. The Chilean curriculum is strongly determined by student’s ages, which created the challenge of constantly adapting it to periods of three or two years of progress. This means our teachers need to develop ways of thinking about the curriculum that focus on larger portions of the trajectory than regular teachers in public or other private schools.

School Circle

According to UNESCO (2022) more than 246 million children and adolescents experience violence in and around school every year and Chile is not an exception to this. Currently, violence is being increasingly used as a way to respond to conflict, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic. In this context, the development of communication skills emerged as a priority. This is why we see the School Circle both as a skill development space and as a protective factor to reduce violence and promote well-being. We believe that if our students learn how to listen to each other properly and how to talk respectfully to others, then we will be able to move forward to other forms of healthy and democratic interaction.

The Circle is where we practice our dialogue skills, and where each one of our students feels at home and welcomed by the classmates and teachers who co-create our community. One of our main objectives with this class format is to get our students to feel confident and to secure a safe space for them to participate freely and interact with others with certain collective rules (Image 2.1).

Image 2.1

School Circle in the early childhood at Kopernikus

In this modality, all of our groups follow some common guidelines to organize the time they spend together. One of the main characteristics of the Circle is that we all sit at the same level, everyone sits on the floor, and the teacher is included in the Circle. Another principle is that the students are in charge of leading the Circle, through a very simple structure they can use. They can choose between different roles and they can switch their preferences weekly. A very important role is the Circle manager, who controls voice turns. Other roles are the ones in charge of keeping silence and keeping time. Once a week they sit for forty-five minutes in this Circle of confidence and companionship and they talk about different matters like their weekends, their families, they go through the week and its main activities, and also talk about their daily life conflicts at school. Circles happen every week in every classroom. And it is one of the things that students and adults at school value the most. Although it is fair to say that getting to this perception has meant an important amount of perseverance, modeling, and also patience.

Student Parliament

At Kopernikus, we dedicate many hours to conversation and dialogue. We are convinced that every problem or situation needs a chance to be solved through open and direct communication. We support the development of communication skills by opening up as many opportunities to practice the tool of dialogue as possible, both in academic and in nonacademic contexts. The student parliament is one of the most important opportunities. The student parliament is a group of students who meet every week to assess the concerns of their class regarding the quality of inter-personal relationships in the school. These students are elected by their peers, and they represent their groups for a semester. This group is guided by a teacher, but are the students the ones responsible for coming up with resolutions and agreements for the school community in situations like lunchtime, playtime, games, discipline, and others. For our students, student parliament represents the space where their voices matter. “We have four basic rules: always meet in a circle and act like a parliament, have a replacement for every member, achieve contentment of every member; objections must be presented as a ‘gift’ to the discussion, and elections are open, without candidates and campaigns,” says Florencia Riedel, president of the 9th–12th student parliament.

Children’s Voice in Class

The Jenaplan model invites us to be constantly aware that each one of our students is unique and has a whole world inside him/her that we need to respect and acknowledge every day. Over the years we have developed processes that aim to give our students real voice in some of the matters that concern them. Some of them have to do with school life and social issues, and others are about their classes and their learning experience. We have realized that giving relevance to their opinion and allowing them choice amplifies the potential of their learning experiences. Sometimes, something as simple as choosing their seats can make a big difference. And other times, students can choose things such as the topic they will conduct their project on or the way they want to be assessed. When students make relevant decisions about when and how to proceed with activities that matter for their learning journey, they become more autonomous and motivated.

Twice a year, children meet with their homeroom teacher and their parents or tutors to talk about their academic performance of the semester. To do this, they have two inputs: the academic report made by the teachers and the Diario de Aprendizaje (Learning journal). The academic report includes comments from the teachers and their learning level in some of the activities that have been evaluated. Teachers do not assign numerical grades to students’ work until 7th grade. Numerical grades in early years of school have few benefits and they can undermine intrinsic motivation and label students in an undesired way. This does not mean they are not evaluated; it just means that we give feedback with concepts which help developing a growth mentality.

The Diario de Aprendizaje is a record of our student’s personal learning journey. Students complete their journal during the semester with notes, thoughts, drawings, sketches, observations, and information about their learning process. Our students use both inputs to self-assess their performance and define their goals for the next semester.

Building students’ autonomy is a relevant aspect of our work and also one of the hardest. The COVID-19 pandemic and the long-term lockdowns we experienced during the academic years of 2020 and 2021 meant a regression in this matter. This has had effects on students’ academic, social, and emotional development; thus, our latest efforts have focused on building this back as they are key components for school and life.

As we have seen during the last few years, empowering students, giving them voice and control about their learning process, is one of the most important ways to respect children’s dignity and autonomy: two essential components of a democratic culture. Over the years we have come to learn that respect and authority are completely related to love and caring about each other (Image 2.2).

Image 2.2

Students from 12th grade working with a teacher

Beyond Our School

As part of its foundational principles and following the Jenaplan framework, Kopernikus has established the work outside the school as one of its cores, pursuing a strong agenda of collaboration among schools, teachers, schools leaders, and students. We have been able to do so mainly through both organized programs and spontaneous and emergent ideas coming up either from the Kopernikus community or from the other schools in our city—both public and charter schools.

Just while we write these paragraphs, we are collaborating with one of the biggest public schools in Frutillar on a pilot to adapt and implement the School Circles within their own school. Fostering spaces for dialogue—and the academic, personal and collective impact it has—arose as an imperative necessity for them evidenced by a socioemotional diagnosis developed yearly by the Chilean Ministry of Education. Every year, we make sure our students, teachers, and school leaders build horizontal relationships with their peers through academic projects, where they can collaborate in some aspects of the Chilean curriculum, extracurricular activities, and professional development. As any other school may agree, it is not easy for schools to design and implement an inter-school collaboration agenda. It challenges timetables, it overloads the teachers’ and school leaders’ work, and it generally means more administrative work. But managing these difficulties pay off in greater opportunities to learn for our students and staff.

The Challenges We Face

Schools are complex institutions that face multiple challenges simultaneously. Developing democratic education at the school is one of them. And it is a fundamental one, especially considering that Democracy faces all around the world: fake news, polarization, mistrust in democratic institutions, social media, etc.

One of the biggest challenges we have faced (and keep facing) is teacher training. At least in Chile, teachers’ initial training prepares them for a type of school that is no longer relevant for the challenges and opportunities our society and students currently face. We counter this by offering our teachers a strong learning community that works weekly to document practices and foster professional development. Still, we are very much affected by the problem of teacher dropout—a worldwide challenge we also face.

During the last years, we have realized that school improvement initiatives consume large amounts of time and energy. Just making sure our School Circles were in order took us a whole academic year. And, of course, this does not mean we are done, since we still need to constantly reflect on the practice and its impacts. We now understand that the best way to improve is to commit and be persistent, and to focus on the tiny details. Despite its size, once improvement initiatives start to work, everyone in our community knows we must work in synergy. And also in a way that tributes our democratic ethos.

Final Reflections

As obvious as it may sound, educating for democracy requires educating in democracy, which poses multiple daily challenges and innumerable greater benefits. The school community is the first “society” in which children participate and take part and this experience is one of the few which can confront to some extent the message of the large society. Democracy is not a given—not in schools and not in our societies. We, as school leaders and teachers, were educated on a rather different approach to childhood and learning; thus, it requires for us to work hard on constantly rethinking our practices. The effort we put in pays off every time we see our students dialoguing their problems, looking out for solutions that may help others, respecting each other, and trusting their voices will be attentively listened and respected by every member in our community.