DIVERSITY IN THE CLASSROOM AND EQUALITY IN DEMOCRACY

The fifth day of the project started with the lecture by Germany in the morning. It was about “diversity in the classroom and equality in democracy”.

This lecture showed a problem with two different sides and the authors initiated a discussion about antinomies. At first, the students from Europa-Universität Flensburg explained the constitution of their country. In this context the development of the German democratic system was explained. Then they described four categories of diversity in society and in the classrooms. These are gender, multilingualism, migration and social disparity. The students presented how society deals with the categories of diversity and which challenges exist in the German educational system regarding these categories of diversity. Afterwards the students presented two conflict areas in the German educational scientific discourse. The first conflict in teaching business is deficit orientation vs. individual resource orientation. This shows the different paradigm of education. On the one hand education is orientated on the individual as self-fulfillment and on the other hand education has the function to serve society.  The second conflict in teaching is between the intent of individual support vs. the order to select pupils. At last, the teacher dipl.paed. S.Grull reunited all these topics together with parts of two political ethic theories, which are Seyla Benhabib’s ideas about multiculturalism and Juergen Habermas´ theory about the society of discourse. The lecture was structured as following:

1. Democracy in the Federal Republic of Germany

2. Classes of Diversities

2.1 Gender

2.2 Multilingualism

2.3 Migration

2.4 Social Disparity

3. Deficit Orientation and Individual Resource Orientation as Conflict Area

4. Individual Supports versus Selecting Students as Conflict Area

5. Without Diversities no Global and no European Democracy References

 

In the afternoon,we started with presentation about Latvia, because always someone do not know where the Latvia is and what is Latvian traditions. All the time we see just bad things in our family (neighbours, friends etc.), but there are also many good things- that way we had presentation about girls and boys relationships and- how important is love to your country. In this workshop we tried to check up knowledges about different countries. First place won handmade medals from Latvia.