Democratic Pedagogy: Recent Episodes
Katherine von Duyke
What is democratic pedagogy and why is it important in the classroom? Why should parents want this for their children in schools?
In this video, I interview Brian Sowards, discussing his reasoning for and struggles with democratic practices in business decision-making. Brian's struggles relate to some of the misinformed ideas I initially had about how democracy should work in classrooms see: https://dpedagogy.blogspot.com/2022/02/classroom-experiments.html Brian's Linked IN https://www.linkedin.com/in/briansowards/
Veteran English and Arts Teacher, Noelle Picara, discusses the dramatic change in her 10th-grade classroom as she gradually released some of the classroom responsibilities and decision-making to her students. A unique experiment as, towards the end of the year, her charter school began to unravel - administrators were staying home, teachers stopped teaching, and students roamed the hallways picking fights. In her classroom, students requested business as usual. Noelle's unique perspective answers a lot of the fears surrounding the use of democratic practices in the classroom.
Further work of Noelle's https://www.ted.com/talks/noelle_picara_dismantling_white_supremacy_in_education
In this podcast, Montessori Early Childhood Educator, and my former homeschooling buddy and I discuss why we like Montessori to encourage students' free-choice learning, classroom culture and management, the use of the peace rose, and I challenge Shelly to consider the use of democratic pedagogy as a means to social problem solving with her 3, 4, 5 classroom. Stay tuned for our follow-up discussion!
In this video, I refer to a Tedx talk I gave on my first trialing of democratic pedagogy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYteTNFPq-g
This interview is also in video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/jcHiawNgnmk
What do I mean by the concept "Democratic Pedagogy" and how is this like the way others use this term and different? Why is this a useful idea for your classroom? See the original trial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYteTNFPq-g