Video and report
from a classroom floor
in compulsory school

"It is the willingness and ability to act independently as a socially responsible person, to take charge of one´s own actions and one´s own learning in the service of one´s needs, that characterises autonomy. The person who achieves it has gone a long way to realise the Council of Europe´s aim of a democratic European citizenship"

(John Trim)

We, the authors, are Barbro Blomquist and Ingrid Sandström and we are both teachers at the intermediate level of compulsory school with about thirty-five years of teaching experience.

We work in Umeå, a university town in the north of Sweden. We have been interested in developing teaching methods in the direction of Learner Autonomy since 1990.

Our starting point was in December 1990 at the time of the Council of Europe´s Workshop 2A in Uppsala. We began to train the children to plan, carry out an assess their own work in English, to think about how they learn, and train the children to take responsibility for their own and their classmates´ learning.

The work in our classrooms is documented on a high-quality videotape and in a report as well.

The video is 23 minutes long and is called "To dare, to want and be able to learn English".
Check out some video screenshots.

The report is called "Report from the classroom floor", and is 21 pages long. It covers significant parts of our work during this period. The report is available for free.

The video tape shows examples of ordinary classroom work among 10-12 year old students in the direction of Learner Autonomy.

It can be used as a kick-off for methodological discussions for teacher training students, in service teacher training or among students.

For more detailed information, please get our report for free.

If you share our interest in these things, we'd be happy to hear from you.

Are you interested in our video and report?

- The report is for free. Write us a few lines and we will gladly post it to you.

- Video costs £30 plus shipping (cost price).
The video is normally distributed on the VHS-PAL format (Europe), but can also be distributed on VHS-NTSC (North-America) if it suits you better.

You are welcome to contact us at the addresses below:

Last updated 2000-04-14