CEU 3961 - Korczak Conference - Education for Excellence, Diversity, and Respect

Course Description

With an innovative nature and an interdisciplinary approach, this course:

1. Brings together an international group of professionals in different fields along with school teachers/administrators and representatives of the Janusz Korczak Associations from all over the world to create a model of professional collaboration that will teach future and current teachers how to support and facilitate such collaboration in their own schools.
2. Pursues a holistic approach to education in tune and in harmony with such great European minds as John Amos Comenius, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, Leo Tolstoy, Rudolf Steiner, Maria Montessori, and the like. The educational system created by Korczak in his orphanages is another convincing argument and a strong proof of success of holistic education and a promising model to follow.
3. Introduces learners to many pedagogical interventions that will provide examples of creative projects and successful US, Canadian, and worldwide schools and teachers. It will allow them to look at the domestic problems in education through the different lens and view the past and current world of pedagogy as a source of constant inspiration and intellectual challenge.This course will also serve as a practical tool to support students in composing their own creative projects and becoming more engaged in their local communities to improve and transform them. As Korczak once wrote, “We can’t leave this world unchanged,” addressing this saying first and most to teachers and other practitioners who work with children.
4. Introduces problems and difficulties that present-day teachers and school administrators experience in different fields such as providing all children with quality education, arranging for a successful inclusive education, creating physically and emotionally safe schools, stopping bullying, etc., and will show them limitations to their solutions on the part of schools alone demanding wider links with local communities and the society at large.

Learner Outcomes

Participants will:

• Receive an opportunity to learn about effective pedagogy and interventions that allow shaping their current and future classrooms and schools into true democratic, emotionally and physically safe communities while exposing their schoolchildren and teenagers to the rights and obligations of citizens of such communities.
• Obtain an expanded understanding of their mission as teachers and educators. They will also gain a new impulse for considering a teaching profession as a calling and service to children, their families, and local communities.
• Gain knowledge and expertise to demonstrate respect for and responsiveness to different cultural and ethnic backgrounds of their future and current learners and to appreciate diversity in schools, districts, states, and the society at large.
• Become knowledgeable about Korczak’s theory and activities, and ways of transforming them into their own well-grounded humanistic philosophy of education and incorporating appropriate ideas into their personal educational practice.
• Receive impulses to become more creative in their own classrooms and schools, and they will also gain skills that will allow translating this creativity and new knowledge into innovative individual and team projects.

Notes