The year 2020 not only presented schools with the great task of conveying the subject matter digitally, but also made it clear how important democratic education is for the education system in Germany. Miss Dr. Adrienne Körner, our regional advisor in Bremen, deals with the question of her work as a teacher and her extracurricular involvement – for example as a specialist in educational sciences and history at the State Institute for Schools as well as her voluntary support in various children and youth projects on the subject of political education – how and with what we could succeed.
–
For Dr. Adrienne Körner, that education has to be democratic. The Internet offers the space to provide unlimited and open knowledge for everyone. Dr. Körner offers in their online seminar the concept of the “MOOC” at. This stands for “Massive Open Online Course” and has a democratic character in that knowledge is offered to an unlimited number of interested parties – regardless of whether they already have previous knowledge or are completely new to digital space. The seminar leader Dr. Körner recommends this form of knowledge exchange to prospective teachers. “I can tell the teachers that on the one hand they can use it to train themselves if they are interested in the topic. On the other hand, they have the opportunity to implement practical ideas directly and bring them to school, ”she reports to the education magazine News4Teach. The learning content at MOOCs is structured in such a way that interested parties can set their own priorities. This is also practical for trainee teachers, because the courses contain both technical basics and practical reports from different schools – multimedia work that can later be used again in your own lessons.
A cooperative school community, in which democratic education does not depend on the individual commitment of a teacher, but becomes teamwork, would be a prerequisite for Way of the democratic school, says Dr. Grains. Schoolchildren would be ready for democracy and human rights education quite early on, but the pressure on the grading had to disappear Participation instead of frontal teaching encouraged and the involvement of extracurricular learning locations occur. The great work and ideas that emerge and how well the internet is once again suitable for presenting them is shown by Dr. Körner’s own students at the Carl von Ossietzky Upper School in Bremerhaven. One group performed a self-written text by a former student. The whole thing was published under the title “Hymns from the Inflatable Boat” and deals thematically with the man-made crises and catastrophes of our time. It can be found here.
The full interview with Dr. You can find Adrienne Körner and Ulrich Ballhausen, research associates at the Institute for Didactics of Democracy at Leibnitz University Hannover here.
– .
