6 years of collaboration with the Athens University of Economics and Business

Charalambos Baltas

Another collaboration completed! The collaboration with the Athens University of Economics and Business initially involved individual Freinet pedagogical partners with Vasiliki Brinia, professor and research supervisor of the University's Teacher Education Program. It has been and still is an innovation for the University  standards, when since 2014 Nikos Theodosiou with the ZIZANIO camera was one of our first members to collaborate with her on student workshops, lessons and films. But in the last two years, the collaboration with the “Skasiarxeio”  team and her lesson has included a full 36-hour training program for young colleagues in our schools. Together we learn and practice on the school cooperative, the development of Celestin Freinet's second technique in his book "The School of the People" (1977), the "What's New?" and the "Class Council" techniques. This year, the pedagogical program was completed with the last two - necessarily distance learning - meetings on 20/3/2020 and 27/3/2020. But they also left a sense of closeness! 

Warm thanks to the “Skasiarxeio” team that supported this effort of creating emotional relationships and a place in their hearts with our future colleagues. Our heartfelt thanks to Zoi Morou for responding to the call from our first meeting, Stella Badikian, on of our oldest members, as well as Katerina Paouri, Maria Zacharopoulou and Katerina Alexiadi  for all they have offered. We would also like to thank Maria Kantourou for all the new material about work plans that she is preparing with Zoi, offering to the development of  this technique for teacher training as well as Sophia Lachlou, who is also entering the track. Special thanks to the school cooperative team, Thania Angeli and Christos Katsaros, with whom we have been working  for so many years now. Finally, highly appreciates for the trust that shows in us and to our future colleagues about all that we share and bring us closer , especially this period that they felt supported by the constant communication we had with them.

 The practices suggested to us about a public school that has the characteristics of a Freinet class with a school cooperative left us with a sweet sense of social economy - with a school garden, soap making, social solidarity, a coin museum, no intermediaries, with liberal arts in public buildings and schools, with the production of citrus sweets, correspondence with other schools that have cooperatives, with newspapers, with a seed storage, with a nursery or with a virtual environment with a library and other forms of support of public school. Information technology, politics and economics became a way of looking at locality, community and possible partnerships - in what we call community schooling - without the branding of the citizenship they are being called to teach from their future position. Everyone worth the hard and priceless pleasure of the poet, the municipality and the sophists!  

We are renewing our appointment with the AUEB Teacher Education Program for the new school year. In this race we fought for the good. And what we are going to do again is to fight and move the lines in public education, bringing pedagogy closer to the movements and the community. Closer meaning, from the meeting of children to the larger concentric circles and from the classroom council to the city and the teacher who lets these children dream. Young and older children. And maybe not only them.

Charalambos Baltas is a teacher at the 35th Elementary School in Exarchia. 

 babisbaltas@gmail.com