PEDAGOGY TOWARDS A LIBERATED SOCIETY

SELF-PRESENTATION OF CHILDREN’S HOUSE AND SELF-EDUCATION STRUCTURE OF THE COMMUNITY OF SQUATTED PROSFYGIKA

The children’s house and self-education structure of the community of squatted Prosfigika is one of the many autonomous structures of the community, which has been reopened for almost two years in the fifth block in the neighbourhood of Prosfigika. It was put together by individuals in solidarity with the community, based on our common understanding of self-organization and the importance of establishing together structures that respond directly to our material and psychological needs. The necessity of reopening the structure, immediately found fertile ground and basis to consolidate the space as well as the first record of the community’s needs that existed from the previous operation of the structure. The previous group of the structure had already recorded the first axes on which it had established its activity and on which we started to work. The children’s structure is a living space with a creative and ethoplastic character. It is the place where children meet to play, socialize and share positive and negative thoughts and events, in order to find together mechanisms and tools to manage and perceive what is happening around us and what we would like to happen. The children in the structure are children of migrants from different places, therefore each young person is accompanied by their own cultural idiom and experience. Our main concern, therefore, is how we co-exist and coconfigure given this dynamic, with the aim of cultivating our common attitude and mindset, in order to organize ourselves and take ourselves into our own hands. Why we struggle and who and what we choose to be is directly reflected in the younger members of our community and that is why we use our structures to share ideas and shape our own culture together.Within the last months, the children’s structure has broadened its agenda, because in the previous year due to the new health treaty it had focused on supporting children in terms of the situation they were experiencing, perhaps more intensely than other people, as they were excluded from even the minimal tele-provision. Consequently, our productive time was spread over more hours of creative activities and additional lessons for the children. Coming to the present day, there is a need to communicate and exchange theoretical and practical experience, and therefore we invite you to this event.

With this event, we aim to communicate with projects and people who are already involved or interested in implementation, spread, and empowerment of radical educational and pedagogical ideas and tools. We would like to create a fertile ground for the exchange of experiences, aiming to expand and strengthen our projects, based on our needs, as well as to co-configure future projects (as well as perceptions, and actions) with mutual foundations. Therefore, to develop together the role we want education to have in radical movements, on the grounds of struggle and liberated territories.

Our goal is also to strengthen intra-community relations and the active participation of the community in the project. We suppose that the educational process and the self-education of young, and not only, community members concerns all people who constitute it, since it reflects the values we choose as our culture and our process of acculturation in them. We want to share the reasons we set up a children structure within a community, as we consider the communities the more efficient way in which people can build a sustainable social life either reflexively to the existing system or by constructing its own structures from scratch.

The children’s structure arose as a necessity of our community, it is created by the needs of children for the children themselves and functions as a diagnostic tool of the pathogenesis of potential relationships that develop between the parts of the community and are reflected upon its younger members. These pathogens we try to approach them creatively as well as to smooth them out in the best way possible, in terms of benefits and community matters.In the community, as we understand, the responsibility of children is shared by all members, so very often the children’s structure has the function and responsibility to coordinate this process, ie observation of emerging situations, experimental intervention, where needed, and finally the consolidation of effective analytic tools. These tools on the one hand strengthen our common understanding and perception of which behaviors we encourage and which we discourage as a community and on the other hand build one jointly agreed framework for action and self-organization.

As we said above, the structure was created and re-operated, based on our needs, without the intention of imposing or suggesting a specific theoretical model. Therefore, after two years of observation, direct practice, and reflection on it, our pedagogical approach emerges, which in the first place is child-centered. This means that pedagogy takes place through the establishment of genuine relationships, based on the belief that individuals develop into persons only through interpersonal relationships, which help them to understand themselves and the world better. For example, children are important to us, so we treat them in this way. We ask for their opinion on community issues as well as ideas about problems in our everyday life.

In this way:

1. In practice are being relativized, dynamic hierarchies such as the teacher-student dynamics. This brings us closer to a state of coexistence and co-construction.

2. Children feel creative and that they can intervene productively in any situation that does not please them.

The above characteristics contribute to the development of children’s positive self-image and strengthen their self-esteem. Εmphasis on self-image and self-perception is reflexive on our part. This is because we are trying to understand the age and cultural heterogeneity among children, as well as to oppose positive images to the intense personal experiences that each of them carries.

We then expand on the socio-centric dimension of our procedures, which unfolds on two levels, firstly the relationships that the child creates with the community and secondly the relationships that the child establishes in the wider urban net, i.e. in the society, having the community as a primary reference point. Οur main concern is that children should be able to build around them equal and collective relationships in whatever group they are part of, as well as to acquire and exercise the attribute of self-regulation, with the goal of self-organization. Finally, the aim is to learn to manage their multiple identities and and the socio-political vicissitudes from which they emerge. As for example, to be aware of when the child comes to the children’s structure in the context of supplementary lessons for school, when they come to socialize and play with others and when to cultivate their collective spirit as a member of the community (e.g. debrief by the children assembly of the children’s structure of the demonstration of the Prosfigika against gentrification )

In the children’s house we work with the following identities: first and foremost that of the migrant, which implies frequent and violent change of environment and status quo. Second, that of the community member, which usually implies that the person from a very young age practices pluralism. All opinions, therefore, carry weight and percentage of truth, as opposed to the paradigm of nuclear family, where the child is mainly defined by by the parents and/or close guardians. Third, the member of the of society, which means that children participate and socialize within public educational institutions, but actually living on the fringes of this society, as they do not enjoy equal benefits with other members of society, many a time and sometimes not at all.

All these identities and many others act in parallel and often overlap. The children fluctuate between their multiple identities and often collide with them. Certainly, however, each one differs from person to person, as each individual is accompanied by their own personal journey, so the conflicts that each child may experience can create countless combinations when put in the context of their interaction with other individuals.

A first example of differentiating an identity by circumstance is the fact that a migrant may be class oppressed or not. It may be that in the same family half of the children were born in one country and half in another. Some might not have been born anywhere – in the eyes of the state – since they are not accompanied by birth certificate or citizenship. Another example, is the behavior of the person as a member of the community, as the reason for belonging to it varies in each individual since the motives and needs are differentiated. It can be by choice or lack of choice, a political stance, temporary or longterm. This is reflected upon the children who act and socialize accordingly, carrying the attitude they take on from their family towards the project.

In this way, the identity of the children as members of society is also differentiated, especially concerning their school identity, if it exists. Apart from children who do not have access to a public school, so they are socialized exclusively within the family and the community, there are also those who find it difficult to cope with school requirements, such as the use and understanding of language, speed of learning or because of serious obstacles to socialization. Finally, there are also those who cope more or less, motivated by personal and/or family motivation.

We consider identity confusion and conflict to be an integral part of modern reality. We, therefore, take a critical view of its origins, which we trace back to social alienation. The aim is to promote identitarian diversity as a condition that keeps the compositional process alive, an essential and fundamental objective of self-organization. Nevertheless, we insist on demonstrating this confusion that the system imposes on us with its own criteria and purposes, since it disconnects us from our primary concerns, which are our spiritual and physical freedom, our collectivization, creativity, and honest social relationships with ourselves and those around us.

So how do we handle alienation in pedagogical projects and in the self-education schemes in which we are involved? Our aspect is that we confront and we try to create positive counter-examples for all chapters in which we are alienated within that system. We build on our own speed our own values, through which we reconstruct our social life on our own terms. Positive counter-examples are tools in the hands of children and other members of the community, which verify that taking responsibility for our own lives is possible and is an act with an impact outside of ourselves. In our confusion and alienation, we propose care and synthesis. Care as for ourselves, redefining our relationship with the environment, our gender, our desires, nature, and any other direct relationship that exists in our lives. At the same time, caring for the other, human or non-human, giving space to encounter and looking forward to the synthesis of the self with the other. Finally, the synthesis of these two processes establishes solid relations of the individuals with the ideas and the materials that surround them.

In this direction, the main tool we use is self-regulation, with the immediate goal of selforganization with the best conditions possible. The reason we choose to focus on the self-regulation of each child individually is to strengthen their mental structures and analytical tools, so that they can identify and point out their alienated identities as well as those of the people around them. They thus acquire direct connection to their choices and actions, therefore they can engage in a process of selforganization more consciously and from an earlier age and become aware through action what a selforganized community means, what our role is in it, how we claim our space materially and mentally, free from bourgeois ownership and privacy. The use of self-regulation as a pedagogical tool of the community, contributes to a simplified interpretation of the tools of critique and and self-criticism for the needs of children, which tools encapsulate our understanding of our common life. We believe that building such projects is possible, although they inevitably reflect elements of management of the enormous social reconfigurations that we are experiencing. However, our structures do not begin and end in their reflexive action. We seek to work on them every day with aim and program. We aim to share with the children, through our pedagogical project, the model of life that we consider sustainable and to trust them to use these tools to collectivize and build lives while maintaining their mental and physical freedom in conjunction with the freedom of the environment, social and physical. On the other hand, our goal is not to create complementary structures to the existing system, running behind its insufficiencies but to structure and replicate our own value system, looking towards the possibility of holistic coverage of all pedagogical needs within the community, with a prospect to the cultivation of the personality and talent of each child.In our program is the constant feedback of our structures with the certainty at all times that we are at a common speed with our kids and grownups, both with those who are directly involved in our project, as well as those we share common ideas and goals with. Moreover, to engage together in common struggles that will open more paths of sharing experiences and shaping new common stories that transcend all kinds of borders and our place on the