Last week, I was supposed to make presentation of my teaching practice and my video I have made with other friends from my group during my teaching practice about democracy and citizenship in Danish schools. However, Dorthe Palm arranged a school visit for us and that's why we postponed our presentation to this Wednesday and we went to a private school called Rudolf Steiner School.
At first, I was a bit reluctant to go because I was in mood of doing the presentation which was almost the only focus of my studying for the last two months. Even though "democratic citizenship" is not a topic that I would normally study in Turkey, I had thought that it would be interesting to work on this topic when it was introduced for the first time. Focusing on this theme for the last couple of weeks, I even realized that I haven't paid enough attention to English lessons. Therefore after thinking about it, I decided to go to this private school; so that I could change my focus point a little bit towards my own subject again. After visiting the school, I am glad that I skipped the presentation and paid a visit to this private school.
Rudolf Steiner School is a private school in Vordingborg, Denmark. It is a little bit different from other schools I have been to during my stay in Denmark. The first thing that makes this school different from other Danish schools I have visited is the fact that Rudolf Steiner School has an interesting vision of the relationships between the teachers and the students: During my visit, I have had the chance to observe a music lesson, and an English lesson of 3th graders. At the beginning of the lesson the teacher of the lesson greeted the students in front of the class and they shook hands. The teacher looked at every single student's face, smiled and said "Hi!". As I was explained by one of the teachers of the school, this is kind of the vision of the school. They do it because they think that each student is a human being who deserves to be respected and who is supposed to respect others. As they shake hands (when they see each other for the first time in the morning and when they enter into the classroom) it means that they accept each other's presence and give the message that they care about each other (quite interesting understanding of caring school,caring teachers; right?). Torben Larsen, the French teacher at the school, calls it, Rudolf Steiner School (Rudolf Steiner Skolen in Danish), spiritual school and in this way they could see what is happening in the students' lives; namely they go inside the students. However, this tradition seemed a little bit strange to me. Because teachers in this school were more authoritative compared to the teachers I have seen in other Danish schools. And just before greetings in front of the classroom, the teachers set students in lines and ask them to put their hands on their chests, on hand over the other, creating a cross. This reminded me an army officer's marshaling the troops. Even though the teachers say that it has nothing to do with discipline I think that it is directly a disciplinary issue beacuse the students wait in lines with their hands on their chests until the silence is provided with the teachers' warnings.
The classrooms of the school are also a little bit different than other classrooms that I have observed in other Danish schools. First of all, they are quite big and they look like rooms of the houses more than classrooms. Students sit in rows unlike other Danish classrooms I have observed. Each line forms a kind of group and they have a special categorization for making the groups. They have four different category of students: the group of leaders( students that show leadership features ), the group of melancholic students( students that seem sad most of the time and behave like they have nothing good in their lives all the time) the group of hyper actives ( students that cannot stand still most of the time) and the group of students that lose their attention very easily. The reason why they put the students with similar features together is that they can be more competitive in that way.
In addition to this, in this school Danish culture is not the dominant culture. The school has an international view and they teach about other cultures as well. There is no seperate religion lessons in this school but the students learn about different religions and beliefs such as Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism etc.
Every week, in Rudolf Steiner School, there is a meeting at the school hall in the morning. The students sing along and every week a different class show ( or say ) something about their work during the week. It may be about math, art, history anything that they have been working on. They share it with the other students, teachers and also some of the parents. On Wednesday, when I was lucky enough to see one of these meetings, a third year class performed some of their play at this meeting, which they have performed again on the stage later on during the day).
Rudolf Steiner School is 37 seven-year old private school which seems to be quite unique in its path and which has obviously a different understanding of education and teaching. There is a kindergarden within the school's campuss as well as primary and lower secondary school until 10th grade. They start to teach German and/or English as a second language from the first grade. If a teacher, graduated from "normal" schools wants to be a teacher in Rudolf, s/he has to apply for a job at this school and if accepted for the job s/he is sent to Norway for three years to study to become "a Rudolf teacher".
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