11 The schools pedagogical and learning beliefs
Our school has students with different social and cultural backgrounds.
We believe that the promotion and learning of languages go hand in hand with the learning and the acceptance of different cultures and then, consequently improving knowledge and awareness of your own language and culture. We believe that welcoming students and teachers with different cultural background is enrichment to both our school community and the local community. This also enables us to get perspective on ourselves, our own language and culture.
We also believe that we need to cooperate with people from other countries, with different linguistic and cultural backgrounds in order to solve the challenges the world issues in future e.g. environmental changes and resource management, sustainable development, cross -cultural understanding and respect. The world is getting smaller and smaller so that we need to be able to communicate without misunderstanding and be able to function in a globalized world. We want to give our students these skills. We believe that these attributes, alongside with linguistic competence, cultural understanding and respect are best learnt when students with different languages and cultural backgrounds cooperate on a daily basis working and studying together. We emphasize that interaction is the key for this learning and not just mere observation. Interactions mean that you go beyond the surface whereas observations of language and cultures contribute more to strengthening stereotypes and regress individual cross-cultural development. This way, we want to make sure that both we and our students have the awareness that “all people with their differences can also be right”.
In order to create a good dialogue and a respectful positive attitude – active participation in societies, the principles of the democracy are important. We therefore focus on student democracy.