Scandinavian experiments in democratic education

Abstract

This article is the first of four articles exploring democratic schools co-founded by teenage students in Norway and Sweden. Our larger project explores the relationship between democracy in education and educational dialogism. Both democracy in education and educational dialogism are partially rooted in the idea that education should be a personal meaning-making practice where the participants can create and organize their lives in ways that make sense to them and explore their interests, values, and desires. We describe the processes of founding two schools – one in Oslo, Norway, and the other in Gothenburg, Sweden – in which students practiced the right to democratic governance. We describe the process of the founding of these schools against the background of the students’ movements in the late 1960s and the 1970s and the social and political conditions in Norway and Sweden at that time. We explore the students’ perspectives on the possibility, desirability, and legitimacy of the students’ voices in ethical-ontological dialogues in which the participants jointly examine their relationships with the world, with others, and with themselves. Further, we explore the forms of democratic school governance that Norwegian and Swedish students created and identified tensions that appeared between the legitimacy of individual students’ rights to ownership of their learning, teachers’ ownership of teaching, and the conventional normative educational policies in Norway and Sweden.

Relationships between Democratic Education and Dialogic Education: Conclusion

“…From my point of view, there are at least two major limitations of this approach to Democratic Education, mostly discussed between Ana Marjanovic-Shane and Jim Rietmulder (2023) and in my contributions (Matusov, 2023a(Matusov, , 2023b. However, one also may find these issues in the articles on the Oslo democratic school (Marjanovic-Shane, 2023b, 2023c, 2023dMarjanovic-Shane et al, 2023). The first limitation is external.…”

“…In the special issue, Ontological Dialogic Education was presented by the articles on the Oslo democratic school's general assembly (Jørgensen, 2023;Marjanovic-Shane, 2023b, 2023c, 2023dMarjanovic-Shane et al, 2023). The students at the Oslo democratic school discussed the educational values of the school, including who must set them and why -which was one of the central foci of the heated meeting, in my judgment.…”

“…In the special issue, a good example of Instrumental Dialogic Education involves some, but not all, participants of the Oslo democratic school (Jørgensen, 2023;Marjanovic-Shane, 2023a, 2023c, 2023dMarjanovic-Shane et al, 2023) who saw dialogue as an effective way to establish a consensus for school goals or solve emerging problems through a consensus or a majority agreement.…”

“…In this special issue, the echo of this approach can be found in the discussions during the general assembly of the Norwegian democratic school in Oslo (Jørgensen, 2023;Marjanovic-Shane, 2023b, 2023c, 2023dMarjanovic-Shane, Kullenberg, & Gradovski, 2023). Also, Jim Rietmulder mentions education for democracy in his democratic school (The Circle School) (Rietmulder & Marjanovic-Shane, 2023).…”

A Soul-searching assembly: Vignette

“…"Ontological" here is used to refer to a personal sense of being and life important issues that matter to the person.7 The General Assembly was the highest organ of the school governance. See more about the governance structure in(Marjanovic- Shane et al, 2023). 8 Tom Remlov was one of the founders and a student of EGO.…”