Our Teacher on an International Didactic Conference

On 11-12 January I took part in the International Symposium on Comparative Didactics (ISCOD) in Orebro (Sweden). Altogether with teachers and researchers we were discussing about similarities and differences of didactical curricula in countries such as Sweden, Poland, France, Norway, Finland or Switzerland. The most common question that we were asking ourselves was: “To what extend the curriculum affects student’s perspective of understanding the world?”. Of course, we were also focusing on more detailed and more practical issues: ways of teaching mathematics, English and native language in different countries, methods of boosting teenagers literary. I was representing our school and I gave a short speech in which I compared two systems of teaching Visual Arts: the Polish one and the International Baccalaureate Program. The IB program enables to discover different cultural contexts and gives the students broaden, multilateral  perspective whereas the Polish curriculum is concentrated on more restrained national area of study and the new curriculum od “Plastyka” puts a strong accent on local culture. I was quite surprised when during the discussion we discovered that the Swedish teachers has the same dilemmas about this new teaching tendency and that the same problems concern their country. My stay in Orebro enabled to me to gain new professional contact with Swedish teachers which, I hope, will be fruitful for our school. In my free time I visited the newly opened art institution called Artipelag (Arts+ Archipelag), the place in which visual arts and nature are creating the unity. A beautiful Swedish example which should be followed….

(text: Julia Łukasiak; photos: Anna Nissen, Julia Łukasiak)