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IDEC : Newsletter, March 2007

(Earlier newsletters follow in reverse order)

IDEC 2007 : a message from Carol Sumie

Dear community,

After some time with no news, now we have some good news!

Venue

Our partnership with the World Education Forum is set and we have the venue of the conference. The Nautico College has offered its space to us for our meetings. For some pictures and information in Portuguese go to http://www.nautico.edu.br/ and click on Histórico.

Web site

Now the web site http://www.idec2007.org is under construction. It is a collaborative web site organized in wiki, like wikipedia. If you want to collaborate, mainly with translation, please let us know.
We want to thank Mike Weimann from KRATZA, who helped us with the domain and some technical issues.

Interested people

We would like to know how many of you want to attend IDEC 2007. Put your names, institutions, things you need to come, difficulties etc. on the web site at http://www.idec2007.org
Are you interested in coming? We need to have an initial perspective about how many peoplewant to come.

Fees

To calculate the fees we have to know all of our costs, mainly for accommodation and food. We don´t have these yet, so we ask for patience ;-)

Financial Support

We are writing a proposal for financial support to a research centre for this kind of conference. For that we need to know from the organizers of previous IDECs what kind of financial support you had.

As soon as possible, we´ll send new information.

Thank you,

Carol Sumie and OrgTeam (casumie@gmail.com)

IDEC 2008: a proposal

David Gagnon has submitted the following proposal on behalf of the Vancouver IDEC organising committee:

Friends,

We submit this letter to formally request approval to host the 2008 International Democratic Education Conference (IDEC) in Vancouver, Canada. We look forward to bringing our resources, skills, passion and hard work to this endeavour.

Who we are:

We are The Society for the Advancement of Non-Coercive Education (SANE) ; we have been organizing under this title since 1992. Our mandate is to support democratic, non-coercive learning environments.

SANE grew from the Windsor House School parents group in order to support Windsor House Democratic School with a broadly mandated advocacy group. The members of SANE bring with us, the experience of growing and learning with Windsor House throughout its 35+ years history. We are a collaborative group of former and current Windsor House teachers, students, parents, founders, researchers, and supporters. Windsor House is Canada's longest running democratic school; it is distinctive in the international democratic school community for having a combination of parent participation, public funding, little academic coercion, a democratic government and multi-age groupings.

Our involvement with IDEC:

Of our current organizing committee, 1 of our members attended IDEC at Summerhill in England (1999), 4 members attended in Berlin, Germany (2005), and 14 attended in Albany, New York (2003); we intend to take part in IDEC 2007 in Sao Paulo, Brazil. We look forward to bringing the knowledge gained from these experiences home to Vancouver in 2008.

Our motivation to host:

As a location:
This will be the first Canadian IDEC and the first conference to be hosted on the West Coast of North America. Due to the social and cultural makeup, amenities and natural resources, Vancouver is a highly desirable destination for people from around the world. Additionally, Canada¹s comparatively accessible border facilitates the attendance of many international visitors.

As an organization:
SANE is in a time of transition. As with transitions generally, this is rich in both rewards and challenges. We are excited to be broadening our goals and directing our energies towards imagining and planning a broad-spectrum democratic educational institute. Simultaneously, Windsor House School is currently in crisis. As a community, we have creatively negotiated many challenges through the generations; our past, present, and hoped for futures will work together to inform this conference. We feel this is a powerful time to invite members of the international democratic education community to share our strong and distinctive history and to collectively strategize for our uncertain and exciting futures. We are motivated by the conversations and connections that we expect to develop, by the task of working together to create such an exciting event, and by the anticipation of raising our profile locally and internationally.

As a group:
We are well positioned to take on this project. As our history of working together attests, we are skilled at creating success by overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles. We have a strong collaborative relationship, have successfully worked on many other committees and projects together, enjoy working with one another, and trust each other¹s competencies. Additionally, we have a large community of people to assist with supporting this conference.

Our goals for the 2008 IDEC conference are to:

• Incorporate a profoundly interactive, flexible, and exciting democratic program for young people as a central part of the conference; this will be modeled on Windsor House and organized and run by alumni and students.
• Foster dialogues across locations, experiences, and approaches within democratic schooling.
• Network and strategize internationally regarding issues facing democratic schooling including the benefits and dangers of public funding.
• Provide a forum to discuss models of how to raise our children given the many crises we face in the world.
• Conduct a conference as carbon neutral and as environmentally friendly as possible.
• Facilitate workshops and events that enrich schools and help them grow in strength.
• Help people experience other democratic schools around the world.
• Generate and increase interest in democratic education in our region and internationally.
• Raise the profile of SANE both within our region and internationally.
  Have a great deal of fun, meet new people, increase allies, and inspire creative strategies for our futures.

Thank you for your consideration and support. We look forward to bringing our commitment, experience, energy and skill to creating a vibrant, fun, and informative IDEC 2008.

David Gagnon
Vancouver IDEC hosting committee
Society for the Advancement of Noncoercive Education
1-1100 Salsbury Dr.
Vancouver BC, V5L-4A8
604-710-5346
IDEC2008@gmail.com

EUDEC

Progress is being made with the European Democratic Education Conference which is to be held in Leipzig, Germany, in the summer of 2008, probably at the end of July or the beginning of August. The organisers are putting together a European network of schools and people that will try to set up a European organisation as the basis of actions and projects and lobbying with the EU, as well as sharing information, setting up student and teacher exchanges, etc. Any Europeans interested in attending the conference should contact leslieocker@aol.com.

IDEAS at IDE

The Israeli Institute for Democratic Education is starting a new one-year program at the end of this coming October 2007, which is to be called IDEAS ­ International Democratic Education Academic Studies.

It is a program that is meant for educators and activists, who seek knowledge and experience of democratic education, and global changing processes. They are looking for open-minded people who are keen to interact with others like them. The program will be conducted in English and will be held in Hakibutzim-College ­ the biggest teacher's training college in the Israel, where IDE is based.

The program will include:

• a greenhouse for revolutionary ideas
• formal study on a wide variety of themes, including the principles and history of democratic education, globalization and Western vs. Eastern culture
• practical experience and voluntary work

IDE in co-operation with the Palestinian-Israeli Peace NGO Forum will provide through this program access to Israeli and Palestinian civil society leaders in various fields as well as the opportunity to experience from the grass-roots level the work of various Peace NGOs in the region.

For further information, email arik@freeall.org, reshefb@zahav.net.il or mahon@democratic.co.il
or visit www.democratic-edu.org/international/ideas.aspx

New web site

The IDEN web site, www.idenetwork.org has been completely revised and is now live.

The data-base has been divided into lists of schools, organisations and individuals. Please check that the information about you is correct.

The main pages are available in English, German, French, Spanish and Italian. We would like to hear from anyone who would be willing to translate them into other languages.

The email address is davidgribble@idenetwork.org.