 |
An International
Conference of
July
29-August 2, 1999
|
|
An International
Conference of
July
29-August 2, 1999
|
 |
This past summer The Village Project Inc. hosted what we hope will be the first of many conferences for educators from Central Europe. The participants were teachers from Poland, Slovakia and Serbia who had already taken part in one of teacher workshops that we have organized over the past four years. With generous funding from the Alfred A. Jurzykowski Foundation twenty teachers from were able to come together for workshops and conversations. The opportunity to meet one another, share experiences, and think strategically about sustaining Village in Central Europe was profitable for all. |
| After several years of talking to teachers who had attended our workshops and visiting the Village programs they run, we gained a sense that a single ten-day workshop was just not sufficient either for the teachers or for building a community of Village educators. It was, then, as part of an initiative to underscore Village as an on-going professional development activity that we hosted this conference. Twenty teachers who had previously participated in Village workshops and have been running Village programs in their schools gathered in Rytro, Poland to share experiences, attend workshops on teaching styles and plan for future cooperation. The conference took place during the Tabor Village II Polish-Slovak Summer Camp, which gave us the chance observe and discuss a Village program in action. |
 |
 |
 |
|||
|
|
|
| Teachers,
many of whom hadn't seen each other since the training workshops two and
three years ago gathered on a Friday morning in the small mountain town
of Rytro, which is close to the Polish-Slovak border in South-eastern Poland.
After brief introductions and goal setting we headed up the hill as an
official ambassadorial visit from the Republic of Peeps, only to be met
by the citizens of Peeps City who had set up a road block and conducted
a very thorough passport control before the visiting teachers and their
peeps could enter Peeps City territory. Conference participants offered
courses at the university in Peeps City, exchanged peep crafts and tricks
with one another, and joined the campers on a Sunday excursion to the Pieniny
gorge.
The workshop included many activities, including role plays similar to those we did at the 1999 Teacher Workshop. From skeletal descriptions of scenes in which the teacher has to respond to a complex situation in a way appropriate to Village, a small group of teachers would decide how to resolve and perform the scene. |
|
| Sometimes after a scene
was played out and after discussing it we would decide to replay it, making
some change or another. Teachers also wrote scenarios for each other,
out of experiences they had had with their students in the classroom.
The conference afforded many opportunities to share experiences and went
far to counter the isolation some teachers felt. In conference workshops
we extensively discussed self-government at Village, peep parliamentary
procedure, and strategies teachers could use to help their students with
the creation of democratic communities in peep Villages.
Both the conference organizers and the conference participants were thrilled with the chance to reconnect and felt that it left Village with a much stronger base in Poland. One participant wrote that her feelings of self-respect and self-assurance as a teacher were vitalized when she was surrounded by so many people involved with the Village Project. All of us left the conference revitalized and committed to continuing the cooperation, sharing and building through future conferences. |
 |
 |
 |
|||
|
|
|
| Report prepared November
1999
by conference organizers and workshop leaders Amy Shuffelton and Noah Sobe |
Return
to Village in Central Europe
What
is Village? What Are Peeps? - A Short Introduction
About
the Organization | Return
to Village Home Page
For more information, or
with comments and suggestions,
please write to info
villageproject.org
Copyright
© 1999-2005 The Village Project Inc.
Page
last updated July 4, 2005