A new primary school, innovative in learning, teaching and evaluation methods, will open its doors at the start of the school year 2008-2009 in Luxembourg-City. Named “Eis Schoul”, the school is a day school and will welcome children from early education and nursery school till the 6th year of primary school.
The concept of “Eis Schoul” is based on two essential pillars:
• The principles of the inclusive classroom approach.
• It is a state-run primary school of research, which will develop new ways of teaching and evaluation in close co-operation with the University of Luxembourg.
According to the inclusive classroom approach, the whole group of pupils participate fully in each aspect of school life, regardless of their particularities on the socio-cultural, physical, sensorial and socio-affective level. More explicitly, the diversity of the children is considered as a source of enrichment that allows to multiply knowledge and experiences.
This is why “Eis Schoul” seeks to welcome a heterogeneous group of pupils that is representative of the school population of Luxembourg, including at least 10% of children with special educational needs (disabled children).
The teaching is individualized, differentiated and takes into account the multiple abilities and needs of everybody, the individual learning paths and contexts. At the same time, the teaching favours the co-operation between the pupils. Education and teaching take place in groups of pupils of different age ranges: such multi-aged groups enable the pupils to integrate autonomy, responsibility and helping others into daily life.
A multi-professional team, composed of male and female teachers, graduated educators, educators, a psychologist and a curative pedagogue, will set the psycho-pedagogical framework of all the pupils in the school. The team´ s multi-professional nature, which unites in itself multiple and complementary competences, makes it unnecessary to resort to special needs structures outside school.
In this state-run primary school of research, research is an integral part of the multi-professional team’s task. The school will develop new ways of learning, teaching and evaluation in collaboration with the University of Luxembourg. One focus will be on using and learning languages at school in order to develop new practices. This is particularly important because our linguistic situation is very different from that in other countries. Special attention will be given to the transferability of the developed practices.
The concept of learning underlying this school project considers that all learning takes place in a "structure of participation" (Lave & Wenger, 1991). The research approach is thus defined as a collaborative effort and all participants (the multi-professional team, pupils and parents) are considered full partners working together with the researchers from the University of Luxembourg.
An exchange network of interested collaborators of education and teaching from the Luxembourgish school system will help to multiply the concepts and methods that are developed at school and scientifically validated through research.
Lave, J., Wenger, E.(1991). Situated Learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.