Education in civil society -  
   
                    Community-oriented small and rural schools as 
                                    avant-garde  structures                                     

                                    27 - 29 Ottobre 2016 

Public perception and media tell us that social development pulsates in metropolises. However, a closer examination reveals that decisive innovative impulses for social development often come from peripheral areas. Regional areas offer space for calm thinking and creative developing, for intelligent recombination of tradition and innovation, for impulses coming from citizens engaged in school realities, as the “Offenen Bürgerschulen” (“open citizen’s schools”, Weingardt 2013). Avant-garde schools are often found more in peripheral and rural areas than in urban schools.
Small schools and rural schools function, so it seems, more than ever as experimental platforms for relevant educational developments for individual communities and civil society. Embedded in concrete physical spaces, often structurally disadvantaged, these schools depend on the development of “obstinate” concepts to overcome didactical and organizational challenges. Fro example, in many parts of the world rural schools have pioneered the integration of virtual and actual learning spaces so that physically small institutions have become extended, collaborative learning environments, integral to the global educational community (Stevens 2016).

Programma

Contributi:

Sonja Saurer e Ludwig Schöpf_School as space for social encounter and communal collaboration. Visions of the schools in Graun and Prad