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The 15th International Democratic Education Conference (IDEC) took place between the 8th and the 16th of September 2007, in Mogi das Cruzes, 65 kilometers from São Paulo. The Conference was organized by the Institute for Democratic Education in Brazil (that after the conference changed its name for Politeia, a Latin word for multiple webs), the Laboratory of Studies and Researches on Teaching and Diversity of the University of Campinas (LEPED- Unicamp), the Social and Environmental Institute (ISA) and the School of Education of the University of São Paulo (FE-USP) as a parallel event to the World Education Forum of Alto Tietê (FME-AT). The World Education Forum was created in 2001 as a result of the World Social Forum, an international movement that aims at uniting initiatives that offer alternatives to the neoliberal hegemony. Organizing IDEC in partnership with two of the best Universities of the continent and also with FME had two main goals: on one side, to question the real possibilities of democratic education being able to formulate public policies and, on the other side, to make them become a subject of academic debate.
Regarding figures, the Conference could be described like that: about 170 people gathered at the event: students, educators, researchers, parents belonging from 65 organizations in 13 countries: Brazil, Peru, Mexico, Canada, United States of America, Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Germany, Ukraine, Israel and Japan. When the activities were also open to the World Education Forum's audience, there were up to 800 people taking part in them.
Those who came from North America, Europe and Asia are part of the international network of democratic education. In order to articulate the Latin-American organizations that could also be part of this network, IDEC organizers listed the organizations in their own networks and sent them a questionnaire about their general conducts and procedures, six months prior to the Conference. Based on the answers to this questionnaire, organizations from different regions of Brazil, a country of continental proportions, and the Latin-American countries mentioned above were invited and effectively took part of IDEC.
The variety regarding types of participant organizations shows the innovative characteristic of this event that happened in an area in which events are, most of the times, segmented into those for teachers or into those for theorists, but almost never for students. Among the participants of IDEC 2007 that informed which organization they were part of, most of them were connected to non-governmental organizations (45%), followed by those that were from schools (33%), public managers (7%) and university researchers (5%). The schools that participated were public (managed by the state or local government), philanthropic or private and also part of different sectors: kindergarten, elementary school, high school and also youth and adult education. Among the NGOs, there were those that worked with full time education, and others that worked with social mobilization in areas that are connected to democratic education, like sustainability of the planet, solidarity economy, democratization of information and communication technologies.
See the photos at:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/13875079@N07/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/13884009@N06/
Sorry, I had to disable the wiki because everything was heavily spammed. --Stefan (2008-04-20)