Colegio Luso Internacional Do Porto - Guidelines For Its Foundation by Artur Victoria By Artur Victoria At Isnare.com Ezine Articles

The proposal for the CLIP – Colegio Luso Internacional do Porto international school that we created is based on five principles defined by Artur Victoria in 1989:

1. Team Teaching:

The isolation of the classroom was broken, and the disconnectedness of the curriculum eliminated. A team of four teachers for the main disciplines (language arts, social studies, science, and math) is in charge of the education of a group , of twenty students. Their individual and group action in the classroom is assisted by community volunteers, ii or by older students, functioning as teacher's assistants. I; Two hours per week are programmed for meetings .The curricular topics are discussed and the progress of each student is analyzed.

2. Cooperative Education:

It’s is an old methodology in new clothing. The, teaching function is not eliminated by group work, but the tension between teacher and students is greatly reduced. This methodology is usually described by the metaphor: the student as worker, the teacher as coach. The role of the teacher is to explain the lesson, to organize the class environment, and to supervise students individually and in groups. Students are made responsible for their own education.

Heterogeneously grouped, they are motivated to deepen their knowledge of the proposed subject, and are made accountable for the progress of the group and of each individual. The objective is to create a different mentality: the notion that we are all responsible for each other; that social responsibility does not derive from any authority, nor from any all powerful government, nor from a concept of state as an impersonal and dominating entity. The objective is to promote creative cooperation, and to avoid the obvious danger of pathetic group conformism with its nefarious characteristics of groupism and group-think. From this perspective, 'the school is quite behind the business sector where similar schemes, such as quality groups, have been utilized for some time.

3. Multicultural Education:

The study of human society in all its forms and nuances, the analysis of who we are as individuals and as groups, is methodically and systematically made. Beyond the curricular interchange between the bilingual and monolingual programs, some specific courses have already been initiated for the study of different languages lard cultures. Through the sister city program, the students enrolled in the course of Japanese Awareness studies will visit Japan for ten days, as part of the: curriculum. This pilot program will in time include the Soviet Union, Italy, Portugal, France, and some Spanish -speaking countries.

4. Democratic Government:

All democratically governed school organizes its components in a way that promotes the continuous interconnectedness of efforts, the distribution of responsibilities in 'accordance with the functions of each member, the creation of structures that permit honest dialogue, the objective analysis ( now the result of the interaction between resources, situations, and objectives), a: continuous and programmed evolution.

5. Integration of the Arts in the Academic curriculum:

The Arts are indispensable to the understanding! Of who we really are as members of a certain culture, I which is in turn integrated in larger cultural circles. Through artistic study, and practice we can discover, understand, and feel the real nature of the culture that surrounds us, when words faii and concepts are insufficient.

We intend to form men and women capable of functioning in a world that demands creative cooperation, mutual respect, and, above all, the capacity, not so much of knowing things, but of being able to learn, of self-education, of systematic research. The w6tld of business and of public administration does not need trained automatons, but technicians who can think and who are competent to act independently in accordance with agreed objectives and at any time.

We are in a world where the relationship between persons and peoples is increasingly governed by the concept of reciprocity. This notion, however, is not an easy one, nor is it necessarily Good. We cannot rest on the development of cooperative abilities, or on the promotion of a better spirit of citizenship through civic education. If in the old models of a patriarchal nature, the inherent inequality was compensated by the sense of justice and of duty, in the reciprocity model such natural defenses do not exist, unless they be informed by ethics. Moral education has thus become an imperative.

The principle of reciprocity, when morally acceptable, does riot include notions of ethnic, cultural, or linguistic superiority or inferiority. Rather, it promotes the affirmation of the human being as a member of a specific culture, which is in turn connected to other cultures, thus forming an interdependent whole.

We stand today before a turning of the pages in the history of our civilization. As in the 1500s, the confrontation with the natural sciences points towards the discord between our intellectual schemes and the experience collected by the senses. As in the XVII th. century, we search for an intellectual structure that would allow us to explain what we see and feel.

Today, to conceive a monoculture school, educational system, or methodology is to conceive the absurd: it is to try to arrest our own development. The universality of the human being in all its dimensions and with all, its attributes is, today, more than a visionary dream: it begins to be a reality. In this manner, the school of our time, eminently international, has a prophetic mission: that of being the laboratory of a future reality. International education is indeed the new frontier of bur development.

This frontier cannot, however, be attained by the mere conquest of new situations, nor by technological advances, nor by scientific discoveries. These only emphasize the real limiting mark of that frontier: the depth of, our knowledge as we understand our own nature and that of our world.

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