Deep Unlearning in a Democratic Free School: How Parents and Staff Members Abandon Conventional Education Assumptions
Deep Unlearning in a Democratic Free School: How Parents and Staff Members Abandon Conventional Education Assumptions

Summary/Abstract: This article aims to explore how the staff employed at, and parents of children enrolled in, a democratic free school in Germany came to step away from the norms of conventional education and embrace a radically different educational model. Democratic free schools are sites of self-directed learning and participatory self-governance/deliberative democracy that reject many of the taken-for-granted ideas about how a school should be structured and what end goals it should seek. What leads people (staff and parents) to such schools, and what catalyses their rejection of the conventional/acceptance of the unconventional? What did they have to unlearn in order to function effectively within this radically different environment, and what supported and/or constrained them in their process of unlearning? This study offers an empirical contribution to the field by exploring, through the method of semi-structured narrative interviews, the experiences and views of nine parents of currently enrolled students and four staff members at a democratic free school in northeastern Germany. This article begins with a literature review of individual unlearning, moves into a discussion of the methodological approach, and then presents the findings from the analysed interviews along with a discussion of the significant and practical implications of the study. The article will finish with future directions for research and the limitations of this work.

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