Ep. 20 Educating the Educator

In the second episode of the series with Basia Vucic about education and childhood, Yamila Rodríguez and Seran Demiral revisit child-centered approaches within a critical perspective by pointing out Janusz Korczak's experience with Polish children in between two wars through an experiment of building a democratic community. Basia both reveals the differences underlying between Korczak pedagogy and social psychologists, like Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky, and explained a unique concept Praeternatural Pedagogy to underline children being as little scientists, thinkers, and human subjects as well. 

Basia Vucic is an expert on the philosophy of education -and especially on JK educational philosophy- from UCL, London (UK). Invited as a 2019 visiting fellow to the UNESCO Janusz Korczak Chair at the Maria Grzegorzewska University in Warsaw, the scope of her research at UCL includes the hidden history of the child rights movement, political theory, and democratic education

Yamila Rodríguez, Lawyer & Ph.D. Scholar, Department of Law, University of Buenos Aires, researches the extension of the international obligation of the state to ensure children's rights to participation and access to justice in the criminal justice system, focusing on children who are victims and witnesses of crimes with her academic training and career as a civil servant at a Criminal Court in Buenos Aires, where she worked for over ten years.

Seran Demiral, Ph.D. in Sociology at Mimar Sinan University, has studied the subjectivity of children through their interaction with digital technologies. She is interested in changing childhood experiences within online environments and teaches digital childhoods, children's literature, creative writing, and sociology at various universities as a part-time lecturer. 

Edited by Nipunika Sachdeva

Music:  Little Idea by Scott Holmes (scottholmesmusic.com) / CC BY-NC