AMI Talks: Nurturing the Democratic Spirit in Education

As we are about to commemorate the adoption of the UN General Assembly's Declaration of the Rights of the Child in 1959 and the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989, this offers a great opportunity to spotlight these rights and share how adults, society, the community can promote and live these rights, so much part and parcel of the Montessori philosophy.We are delighted that you can hear from Pavithra Rajagopalan and Koen Schaap,  two speakers who each will bring a different, yet complementary focus on how these rights need to be advocated for and protected in education, and how we can help prepare children and youth to become contributing members of society.Pavithra Rajagopalan is an AMI 3-6 trainer; she has worked in Montessori schools in India, the US and New Zealand. She is involved in strengthening pioneering projects related to Early Childhood Education in under-served communities. She is part of the faculty at the Sir Ratan Tata Institute, Mumbai.Pavithra will argue that a democratic spirit is not about casting our vote once every 3, 4 or 5 years. It is more about being an active participant within any framework and exercising the right and fulfilling the duty to choose to function a certain way and also shaping the way that the framework functions on a regular basis.How does education recognise this aspect of daily life and what allocations do we make for the development of the democratic spirit? Particularly in Montessori, in the various contexts—schools, parent networks, training centres, affiliates, AMI, etc. — we may recognise the need for democratic processes, but does it always translate to democratic experiences for the participants? When it does, what are the principles that we uphold?Eventually, when the experiences marry processes, we see the coming of outcomes such as adaptation and critical consciousness in the individuals.Koen Schaap is an experienced Social Science teacher at IVKO, an art-based Montessori secondary school in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Besides teaching adolescents, he is a curriculum developer, coach and trainer at the Amsterdam Montessori Study Center.The Study Center is part of the Montessori Group of Schools in Amsterdam with over 5700 12-18 students and approximately 500 teachers.Koen will share insights from the work conducted by the Montessori Study Center Amsterdam on “Living Democracy with Adolescents in Large Urban Schools.” These schools serve around 5,000 young people (ages 12–18) from richly diverse cultural and economic backgrounds—contexts in which democratic values sometimes clash with those of the broader Western society they live in, as well as with the rise of right-wing populist parties in the Netherlands and across Europe.Koen’s presentation will explore how educators and students navigate these complexities, fostering democratic principles within learning environments that generate new understandings of participation, equity, and voice.

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