DEMOCRACY IN SCHOLS: TRAINING THE TEACHERS IN ANKARA

Ankara 2021, August. The first few days of the month aremuch too hot. Most teachers are on holiday, but not all. 240 teachers from 10 provinces across Turkey participate in a long seminar to become trainers as part of the EU/CoE Joint Project “Strengthening Democratic Culture in Basic Education”.

The Ministry of Education, present and closely participating in the project, decides to upgrade the nature of the trainers’ capacity and to accred it them as trainers for teacher training in general with a series of tests.

It’s now already Day 4 of training the trainers. 2 days to finish Module 1, then in 3 weeks 5 more days for Module 2. After that, in September already, our fresh trainers will train teachers across 110 pilot schools all over Turkey.

In Adana, Aydın, Burdur, Çanakkale, Iğdır, Muğla, Kars, Sinop, Sivas and Yozgat, teachers at all educational levels experience the Whole School Approach and Competences of Democratic Culture – everythingthat makes EDC/HRE a vital part of school culture – with the help of different activities.

And Living Democracy couldn’t be absent from the party, with its content, spirit and methods blended with other CoE educational tools working towards a common hope: democracy in action in schools.

The website living-democracy.com has all the information you need to describe fully the background and the implementation of democracy at all school levels in 6 volumes. This workshop made use of all 6 volumes.

To name just a few examples: at this event, part 1 of Volume 1 (and especially the three dimensions of EDC/HRE) were there (https://www.living-democracy.com/textbooks/volume-1/part-1/), alongside constructivist learning, a human rights-based approach and – while listening to the outcomes of EDC/HRE chapter – the telling of funny stories.

Volume 4 showed us three dimensions of EDC/HRE, and participants noted that the introduction goes a step deeper to the issue (https://www.living-democracy.com/textbooks/volume-4/). Volume 2 made us see how three dimensions of competence are important (https://www.living-democracy.com/textbooks/volume-2/).

Volume 5 (Children’s rights) and Volume 6 (a collection of short exercises) were two books which patiently waited for their turn at the end and were full of potential stories, activities and ways to implement ideas. Everyone at the Training for Trainers had a good time despite their hard (sometimes exhausting) but always excellent work.

To those who might be wondering what happened to Volume 3, I assure them of course it was, with its “HOPE College” story as an application for adult learning (https://www.living-democracy.com/textbooks/volume-3/). But this is another story, which we’ll come back to later on.

By Angelos Valliantos