These are challenging times and we need Bildung, hope and a European spirit more than ever.
We have taken the European Bildung Day online this year and hope to be seeing you on May 8th and 9th. The various sessions will be a mix of presentations and discussions in smaller break-out groups; we aim to make the conference very interactive.
For technical reasons you need to sign up as a member of the European Bildung Network before you can sign up for the conference; please join the European Bildung Network here.
Participation in the conference is 49 € (students 19 €), please sign up for the European Bildung Day online event here.
When you have signed up, we will send you more information about how to pick your preferred workshops.
Online Program Friday, May 8
15:00 – 18:00
Setting the scene, framing the future
- 14:00-15:00 login, get settled in our virtual conference venue, explore some amazing art, take the Bildung Quiz and get into that European Bildung spirit…
Conference
- 15:00-15:45 Opening and welcome
- 15:45-16:30 Introducing the future – Transformations in 21st Century Europe and the importance of Bildung; keynotes
- Break
- 16:45-18:00 Framing the future, framing Bildung – Panel and plenary debate; this session will be a mix of larger and smaller break-out groups.
Friday's Keynote Speakers
Art and science represent different kinds of truth and different creative paths to truth. Christine Buhl Andersen is Chairman of the New Carlsberg Foundation. The Foundation has supported the arts generously since 1902 when it was created by Carl Jacobsen, heir of the founder of the Carlsberg global brewery.
Artist Jeroen van der Most creates art with data, algorithms and Artificial Intelligence. He explores how technology impacts the human story. His artworks visualize the rise of AI and inspire thought on who we are and the possible troubling – or utopian – futures that technological developments might bring.
The way we produce and consume is not sustainable and we need an ethical approach that works. Anders Wijkman is a Swedish opinion leader and author, chairman of the Governing Board of Climate-KIC and member of the International Resource Panel (IRP).
Futurist and author Lene Rachel Andersen has developed the Bildung Rose, which illustrates how our inner world, i.e. our understanding, must match the outer world in order for us to thrive. Lene is co-founder of Nordic Bildung and the European Bildung Network, and she is a member of the Club of Rome.
Your hosts for the afternoon
Fireside Chat Friday 20:00-21:30
Emergence from Emergency – Enlightenment 2.0
How do we create the next enlightenment that will allow us to solve the immense problems facing humanity and the planet?
Scientists have been warning about climate change since the 1950s, the Club of Rome published Limits to Growth in 1972, and the WHO warned against a pandemic as late as september 2019.
And here we are: locked up in our homes, not knowing when we can return to “normal” and what the consequences to the climate will be.
Why are we so incredibly bad at understanding the threats to our existence in advance? And what are the best practices when it comes to education, bildung and change? Can we create an Enlightenment 2.0 to take us to a sustainable future?
Join us for a fire side chat with Sandrine Dixson-Declève, co-president of the Club of Rome, Uwe Gartenschläger, president of the European Association for the Education of Adults, and Peter Gärdenfors, professor of cognitive science and member of the Royal Swedish Academy.
Deputy secretary general, DVV International
Online Program Saturday, May 9
09:30 – 17:00
Working together, creating the future
- 09:00-09:30 Coffee Lounge – Login and check out how we celebrate the 70th Anniversary of the Schuman Declaration.
- 09:30-10:30 Good morning, Europe! – Harvesting yesterday’s insights in plenary
- 10:30-12:00 Parallel Morning Sessions I, II, III, IV (for content, please see below)
- 12:00–12:30 First harvest – Presentations and harvest in plenary from the four parallel workshops
- 12:30–13:30 LUNCH
- 13:30–15:00 Parallel Afternoon Sessions I, II, III, and IV (for content, please see below)
- 15:00–16:00 Second harvest – Presentations and harvest in plenary from the four parallel workshops
- 16:00–17:00 Next steps – A Bildung Manifesto for Europe – Future activities – Concluding the conference
Parallel Sessions Saturday
Each of the parallel workshops is 90 minutes, there will be 3-4 short (8 minutes each) presentations, then Q&A and discussion.
Morning – Workshop 1
Bildung during societal transformation; what kind of Bildung “content” is necessary?
Inspiration and discussion
Morning – Workshop 2
Bildung in childhood and at a young age
Inspiration and discussion
Morning – Workshop 3
Bildung as a business service
Inspiration and discussion
Afternoon – Workshop 4
Bildung during societal transformation; what kind of programs and venues are necessary?
Co-creation
Afternoon – Workshop 5
Bildung and national identity
Inspiration and discussion
Afternoon – Workshop 6
Bildung in academia from a student perspective
Try it yourself and do it yourself
Details about all parallel sessions
Morning - Workshop 1: Bildung during societal transformation
Inspiration and discussion
We all more or less know what kind of Bildung was needed in the industrialized modern society, but what kind of Bildung is needed as societies are undergoing structural transformations? What kinds of knowledge and abilities are necessary and to whom?
In this presentation Deep Bildung will be explored as a multilayered concept, metaphor and phenomenon, inspired by the concept of Deep Ecology and Ecosocial Bildung.
Our approach to Bildung – in Finnish: sivistys (which is an even broader concept) – must be updated to match today’s challenges. The social transformation that we face will take Bildung that gives us the capacity to reform and the wherewithal to respond to today’s wicked problems.
The Bildung+ project will increase the value of traditional Bildung by updating and expanding this concept – hence the “plus” in the title of the project. The project will initiate societal discussions about Bildung and support new kinds of folk-Bildung activities.
When we went from the traditional feudal absolute monarchies to modern democratic industrialized nation states, Europe spent almost 160 years from the onset of The French Revolution to the creation of the United Nations developing the necessary institutions for this new kind of society. We also had to create the necessary bildung for it.
Due to new information technologies, we need new institutions and new bildung again — what might they possibly look like?
Morning - Workshop 2: Bildung in childhood and at a young age
Inspiration and discussion
Children need Bildung just as much as adults do; meet some new takes on primary and secondary education.
‘Efterskole’ literally means ‘after school’ and is a Bildung year at a boarding school, typically after the 9th grade. One of the reasons Efterskole in Denmark has become such a great success is that Efterskole gives teenagers the opportunity to live away from home before they move out from their parents for good. 100 to 150 young students, with teachers who have time to connect with each student in a set frame for Bildung, creates individuality, self-confidence and self-reflection on a very high level. The Efterskole-tradition is built from the idea of Grundtvig’s and Kold’s philosophy of enlightening the youth.
The Association of Danish Pupils works on behalf of primary and secondary school children in Denmark; meet two of their volunteers who are taking a gap year after the 9th grade in order to promote democratic empowerment among pupils and to promote their interests among policy makers.
The Association of Danish Pupils works on behalf of primary and secondary school children in Denmark; meet two of their volunteers who are taking a gap year after the 9th grade in order to promote democratic empowerment among pupils and to promote their interests among policy makers.
Jamila Tressel is a young author, speaker, trainer and coach, empowering people to unfold their potential and make a change. She is campaigning for a drastic change of the education system and a sustainable transformation of our society. Speaking at national and international conferences and leading trainings for students, teachers and managers, Jamila Tressel is supporting and collaboration with the education initiative “Schule im Aufbruch” (Schools in Transformation).
Among its many activities, the Ekskäret Foundation hosts the Protus Summer Camps for teenagers on the island Ekskäret in the Stockholm archipelago.
Tomas is an entrepreneur, investment banker and property developer with a great interest in science and philosophy. The aim of the Ekskäret Foundation is to support sustainable development for individuals, organizations and society. Tomas is also the co-founder of the research institute Perspectiva in London, of the Co-creation Foundation and the media platform Emerge in Berlin and 29k.com personal development platform.
Morning - Workshop 3: Bildung as a business service
Inspiration and discussion
Bildung is important at all ages and across society. You will experience and explore how consultants and coaches engage CEOs, HR leaders and employees who define today’s economy. We will explore similarities and differences between their approaches, and we will discuss how this relates to Bildung activities for other target groups.
We have gathered a handful of business consultants who service a category of adults who are often hard to reach for educators: the busy 35-55-year-old decision makers in business and commerce.
The world of business is facing current challenges of disruption that demand new ways of working together and require wholistic learning as well as self-reflection. Integrating great works of mostly European art with the insights of depth psychology as developed by Swiss psychiatrist C. G. Jung, the Symbolon® coaching method helps unearth potentials and initiate foundational change in individuals and teams. The visual metaphors that result from these processes of deep self-reflection counterbalance the preponderance of left-brain analytical thinking usually present in most businesses, allowing for better and more inclusive decisions.
One day in the future: the sky is green and the grass is blue, knowledge is available in liquid form and we float to Peru on a Co2 positive carpet.
The desire to shake up and rethink stiff parts of our society led me to experiment with a method called Design Fiction. It allows us to broaden our horizons towards the seemingly impossible and tell stories of speculative future scenarios. The point of departure is a systematic understanding of historic patterns with the mission to pave the road towards a desirable future of human and nature. Let’s design futures instead of predicting them!
Organizations are either ‘unconsciousness centres’ or ‘consciousness centres’. Unconscious organizations are characterized by silo thinking, power games and unresolved conflicts. Employees in unconscious organisations feel stressed, become less efficient or even ill over time. Conscious organisations, on the other hand, cultivate open dialogue and transparency. Employees feel safe, use each other as learning partners for their own development and work co-creatively. As a result, they are healthier and more efficient. My company Conscious U GmbH, helps organisations reinvent themselves as Conscious Tribes.
what do we know about the productivity of not acting?
how to embrace moments of waiting and letting go?
Afternoon - Workshop 4: Bildung during societal transformation
Inspiration and discussion
We must consciously create the society that is to come after the fossil fuel industrialized modern society, but what kind of Bildung is needed as societies are undergoing structural transformations? How to empower people to actively co-create and shape the yet unknown? What kind of programs, what kind of venues?
Co-creation
What kinds of programs and methods do we need for Bildung in the 21st century and as societal structures are being redefined?
The moderator sums up the presentations from the morning session, and then Dr. Laurence Guérin and Daan van Riet present their research project:
Democratisation of critical thinking – how to approach bildung in vocational education
In a research workplace, 18 teachers and 7 experts work intensively together to improve vocational education in the Netherlands. It focuses on the integration of bildung, citizenship-, language- and vocational education. Where critical thinking is the starting point. The project is called ‘democratisation of critical thinking’. The group is pioneering, experimenting and researching the integration of bildung in vocational education. They pave the way for more colleagues in the Netherlands.
After their presentation, the workshop splits up into smaller break-out sessions of co-creation.
Afternoon - Workshop 5: Bildung and national identity
Inspiration and discussion
Europe is a complex fabric of modern, democratic nation states, each of which also needs to be an imagined community with a shared language and a somewhat homogeneous culture and epistemology; how do we promote cohesion and cultural diversity among ethnic majority cultures and minorities within states? How do we maintain both diversity and cohesion? What kind of Bildung do we need?
The Ukrainian society is trying to run from the Pre-Modern to the Post-Modern while being not exactly on friendly terms with neighbouring Russia. The ideas of Bildung and Nordic folk high schools have thus been quickly appreciated in Ukraine. What are the barriers and issues that need to be addressed, what may be the right Bildung solutions in Ukraine, and who need to be involved in the complex task of reinventing the solutions rather than simply replicating the Nordic ones?
Migrants moving from one cultural zones with certain hallmarks into another one transform not only certain behaviour but also values and social norms. The subjective dimension of social integration can be measured by several indicators, such as feelings of national identity towards the country of origin or destination, perceptions of prejudice or discrimination, or satisfaction with living in the host country. But we need also to understand what motivates migrants to integrate, wanting to be a part of their new homeland. This study is based on the Migrants World Values Survey analysing 6 516 non-european migrants in Sweden.
In the last 15 years, a Folkhögskola with Muslim profile, Kista Folkhögskola, and a Folkhögskola with Jewish profile, Paideia Folkhögskola, were established in Stockholm, Sweden. They have developed in cooperation and have had a continuous dialogue and exchange of ideas vis-à-vis their founding ideas and educational philosophy. So what happens in the intersection of Swedish, Muslim and Jewish Bildung? This presentation will raise some of the ideological considerations as well as practical questions that have been asked throughout this joint work.
Afternoon - Workshop 6: Bildung in academia from a student perspective
Try it yourself and do it yourself
The only thing needed to create Bildung programs in higher education is to let go of the conviction that you have something to teach. Education needs to focus on exploring questions rather than providing answers. In this session the director, a student coach and a student of the Bildung Academie will share with you how they are currently implementing Bildung in Dutch higher education. Inspiration, room for discussion, and concrete guidelines for doing it yourself; it’s all in this session.
Building Bildung: Develop Bildung education in a bottom-up style.
The focus will be on creating our own Bildung educational program. De Bildung Academie in Amsterdam was started by the students themselves, because something was entirely missing from their curriculum: Bildung. Experience one of their ‘classes’ and hear the story about the students who are now promoting Bildung in companies and universities across Europe.
Rebecca is one of the students at De Bildung Academie.
Organizers of European Bildung Day 2020
