Janusz Korczak Research Articles

Differing Interpretations of Janusz Korczak’s Legacy in Schools that take Inspiration from His Work: A Study in Four Schools in the UK and Canada

The purpose of this paper is to present how a selection of current school leaders in two countries, other than Poland, the country in which he lived, perceive the legacy of Janusz Korczak. These two countries are the United Kingdom and Canada. Its role is to present these interpretations for debate and discussion among other school leaders and practitioners, who claim inspiration from him worldwide. We have not suggested that there is a correct or incorrect way to interpret Korczak, rather we are simply interested in how current practitioners perceive his work. The first part of this article is a brief summary of key aspects from the life and works of Janusz Korczak that have entered educational conversation within the United Kingdom and the wider Anglophone world. This has often been through writings by and for teachers or books written for schools, rather than academic texts or even Korczak’s original works. Key aspects of his life story presented here are: those years leading the orphanage ‘Dom Sierot’, and most especially the final months of his life in the Warsaw ghetto, and the last recorded events of his life, including his refusal to go to Theresienstadt and his ultimate death in Treblinka. We also present in this section, because of an expectation that schools may have engaged with these, his views on how societal structures being designed by adults disadvantage children; and his valuing of children’s voices, as well as his views on the problematic nature of authority. This paper is a discussion of four linked case studies. Participants for this study were four school leaders, two from the UK and two from Canada. The schools they lead are schools that in public facing aspects of their schools, such as school webpages or public vision statements, refer explicitly to the influence of Janusz Korczak. The method of data collection used within this study was unstructured interviews with school leaders. Through this process we discovered that there are commonalities in how his legacy has been perceived. These included, for all, intertwining his life and work and in doing so presenting him as a role model to children and teachers. Other aspects of his influence focused on student voice, the breaking down of hierarchy and the enabling of creativity.

GENDER EQUALITY AND CHILDREN’S EQUALITY IN LIBERAL AND CONSERVATIVE DISCOURSES: IMPLICATIONS TOWARD LANGUAGE AND SOCIETY

This introductory article is intended to open the volume of work prepared by the participants of the 12th UNESCO Janusz Korczak Chair International Summer School. The participants presented these papers at the RC25 ISA Interim International Conference in Warsaw, entitled: "Language and Society. Research Advances in Social Sciences" (26-27.09.2019), exploring the concepts of gender equality and children's equality in liberal and conservative discourses and practices invested in language. The papers in this volume primarily use the methodology of discourse analysis and a range of tools and methods within this framework. The purpose is to shed light on how discourses inform preferences, behaviours and representations, towards the positioning of individuals in society, based on their respective gender and their individual status - whether an adult or a child. It is interesting to explore what is expected of the holders of these positions and whether they are able to confront and renegotiate their situation. The authors look into gendered childhood, analysing if differences can be found in so-called conservative and liberal discourses. The gender aspect of childhood and the resistance towards children’s expected positions interlinked to their gender is visible to diverse degrees in this selection of papers. The concept of social positioning due to one's gender is at the heart of this volume. Therefore, this Editorial forms a theoretical backstage for the volume of works included in the special post-conference issue of Society Register.

The reflection paedagogy of Vasyl Sukhomlynsky and Janusz Korczak

Bogusław Śliwerski, The reflection paedagogy of Vasyl Sukhomlynsky and Janusz Korczak. Interdisciplinary Contexts of Special Pedagogy, no. 27, Poznań 2019. Pp. 99–115. Adam Mickiewicz University Press. ISSN 2300-391X. e-ISSN 2658-283X. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14746/ikps.2019.27.05The subject of the analysis is the paedagogical thought of the leading representatives of the new education movement in Poland and in the Ukraine. The timeless character of their reflection paedagogy was exemplified by the orphans’ home of Warsaw, Poland, and the School of Joy in Pavlysh, Ukraine, the organisational solutions, rules of (self-)education, the system of social and moral standards bound educators the same way as they did those under their care. The phenomenon of the radical, unique approaches to supporting children, which they created, is a challenge for coming generations. With this work, I also open up the debate and the need for further research concerning the origins and consequences of transgression of state borders by paedagogical thought that constantly changes its approach to humanist paidocentric paedagogy in a world, in which authoritarian, directive or instrumental paedagogy continues to have a strong presence. In this regard, I focus primarily on the similarity of thought between both these educators, indicating the differences in their approach to the child.

Podmiotowość nadawcy w dawnym tekście naukowym... na podstawie analizy manifestu pedagogicznego Janusza Korczaka Jak kochać dziecko. Dziecko w rodzinie

The article concerns the writer’s identity in the old scientific text in the light of Janusz Korczak’s work How to love a child. A child in the family. Attention was also paid to the roles which the author plays in the text. He is identical with the author of the work and he is a doctor, educator and philosopher. The article also discusses the emotional involvement of the author and his pedagogical passion. The history of the book creation was discussed, and then the language forms, through which the subject of the text was revealed, were shown.

Hybrydowa tożsamość na kulturowym pograniczu – potencjał i problem osobisty i grupowy?

<p>W opracowaniu podjęto próbę uzasadnienia tezy, która dotyczy potrzeby stwarzania przez politykę edukacyjną możliwości dokonywania samodzielnych wyborów tożsamościowych. Wskazano, że kulturowe pogranicze w sposób naturalny umożliwia kreowanie hybrydowej tożsamości, która stanowi potencjał człowieka, lecz także rodzi problemy osobiste i grupowe. Ponadto przedstawiono autorytety i osoby znaczące (są to m.in. Sokrat Janowicz, Ludwik Zamenhof, Samuel Pisar, Janusz Korczak, Piotr Lachmann, Wojciech Korfanty, Czesław Miłosz), wskazując przy tym na kształtowanie się i reprezentowanie przez nich tożsamości hybrydowej. Zwrócono uwagę na warunki, jakie powinny być zapewnione, oraz na działania, jakie powinna podejmować edukacja, aby człowiek nie czuł się zniewolony w procesie kształtowania się tożsamości, lecz odczuwał wsparcie w procesie powstawania i realizowania swojego potencjału hybrydowego.</p>

“Children’s Week” as one of the activities of the Polish Childcare Committee in the Second Polish Republic

The aim of this article is to discuss “the Children’s Week” event organised from 1926 by the Polish Childcare Committee, which was the prototype of today’s Children’s Day and Mother’s Day. This issue has not been the subject of scientific analysis. The aim, meaning and course of “the Children’s Week” in the Second Republic of Poland were analysed based on the interwar sources’ materials. This holiday was one of the social events organised by the Polish Childcare Committee, which, as a body of the Ministry of Labour and Social Care, was responsible for improving health and social conditions of children and teenagers. Therefore, it organised care units for mothers and children, published scientific papers, propagated tasks related to the care of children and teenagers, and organised and conducted exemplary care institutions. “The Children’s Week” was a social event, which aim was to make Poles more interested in the situation of children and teenagers. For seven days the importance of proper care of the youngest children in a rebuilding country was emphasised. Every day was devoted to education or upbringing issues as well as the functioning of schools and social centres. The Children’s Day was on the first day of the event, and the Mother’s Day on the last. “The Children’s Week” in the Second Republic of Poland proceeded in accordance with the programme prepared by the Polish Childcare Committee. Each Voivodeship office tailored the programme to their capabilities and regional conditions. Despite the criticism it attracted, “the Children’s Week” was an extremely important social event, which was supported by pedagogical authorities, among others, Janusz Korczak. Annually, the public attention was focused on childcarerelated issues for seven days. This event was in line with the European trends at that time, in which children’s rights and freedoms were gaining more and more supporters.

Problematyka relacji osobowych w ujęciu Janusza Korczaka w odniesieniu do wychowawców i nauczycieli. Rekonstrukcja teoretyczno-empiryczna

Janusz Korczak’s works and pedagogical activities can be perceived on different levels. This text is a proposal of the analysis of Korczak’s achievements in the context of building personal relation-ships in the process of educating with respect to alumni and teachers-educators. In Conclusions the created reconstruction of the way Janusz Korczak understood mutual relations was interpreted in the context of the idea of dialogical personalism. It is a theoretical and empirical article based on Korczak’s works, the materials collected during a visit to Korczakianum. The method applied in this reconstruction was the fusion of the analysis of selected works and the open interview with the managers of this research lab.

Korczaka i współczesnych pedagogów ulicy koncepcja uwspólniania świata jako inspiracja podejść partycypacyjno-rozwojowych w pracy z dziećmi ulicy

Janusz Korczak has his unique contribution to the development of work with street children. The purpose of this text is an attempt to answer the question: what has Korczak in common with people who are working with the category of abandoned, neglected children nowadays? To what extent his views, developed over a hundred years ago, are an inspiration for educators taking up work in the street space today? To answer these questions I will refer both to Korczak’s thoughts contained in his works as well as to the texts created by contemporary educators. The analyses confirm that the common feature of the described projects is the concept of sharing the world. Both Korczak and pedagogues of the street situate themselves close to the children’s community, participating in their everyday life. Both pedagogues and Korczak refer to a similar concept of the child, focusing primarily on the child’s potential. They try to get to know the child’s living conditions and by understanding its habitus they aim to take actions appropriate to child’s abilities, avoiding elements of symbolic violence.

Janusza Korczaka językowa gra z odbiorcą w racje i emocje – spotkanie dwóch perspektyw

Janusz Korczak’s literary writing can be perceived as an endeavour to change the world, to make the world fair and marked by greater solidarity. The reading of his texts draws attention of the recipient to the ways in which he characterises children and calls for the necessity of treating them rightly by adults. The author of the article focuses on the persuasiveness of narration, understood as a specific game played with the recipient, and the linguistic features used by Korczak in his literary works. The aim of the article is to show the linguistic features employed by Korczak in presenting theses regarding the situation of children and expressing his beliefs about the protection of children’s rights. The author analysed Korczak’s literary work entitled When I am Little Again. Stylistically diverse narration is subordinated to one goal – convincement of the recipient to the narrator’s arguments. Considered as a whole, the article is an attempt to combine a pedagogical perspective with the poetics of reception.

Dorośli (i dorosłość) w pismach Janusza Korczaka

Analyzing the texts of Janusz Korczak, we focus mainly on the child (and childhood), which he put in the center of his reflections. He emphasized the importance of childhood humanity (full and not maimed), associated with it: the dignity of the child and respect for him and the world he created. The purpose of this text is to reflect on how Korczak perceived adults and adulthood and what meaning he gave them in his writings. In order to achieve such a goal, a phenomenographic analysis of the content of several leading works of Janusz Korczak was made. It seems that this topic, although not as expressive in his works as the theme of a child and childhood, is equally important, because in the care and education for centuries, children and adults face each other.

Czytając Korczaka (Zarys projektu badania dydaktycznego)

The paper presents a number of problem research situations of reading in the University pedagogical training. The paper’s focus is on the Belarusian State Pedagogical University students’ addressing the heritage of the Polish pedagogue Janusz Korczak. Described are common readers’ strategies used by students in the process of learning and marginal textual tactics creating the possibilities of diversification of readers’ practices in class. The condition for such kind of transformation is Korczak’s specific design of pedagogical statement which enables him to act as a “screen” for students to project and implement their pedagogical experiences.

„Momenty wychowawcze” w projektowaniu procesu kształcenia kulturowej kompetencji dzieci

The article presents the results of an educational research project implemented in the school year 2018/2019 in selected primary schools in urban environment (Łódź). The aim of the study was to diagnose Janusz Korczak’s “educational moments” in designing the process of developing cultural competence. The investigator appeared in the role participant as an observer (the researcher came from the examined environment and had the opportunity to “blend into” the events). The material came from participant observation. The observation embraced practical and socio-cognitive activity of the pupils. The results allow recognition in how a child, applying language, marks its being in the world, how it acts via language, how it uses language to reach the mysteries of the world and what it does with language during this operation. The final comment suggests that school is there to help a child to interpret the world, to recognize various phenomena, to assume attitudes towards them, and to make their independent evaluation.

Nie przeoczyć teraz – filozofia codzienności Janusza Korczaka

In this paper, I focus on one of the children’s rights, which Janusz Korczak raised in his writings, namely the child’s right to the present day, which I understand as a postulate to appreciate the dignity of a child in its everyday life. My aim in this paper is, therefore, not only to reconstruct and uncover the complexities of this postulate, but also to theoretically embed this concept in pedagogical narratives about the child, and more specifically in anthropology of education and upbringing. In order to achieve this aim, 1. I will describe two paths in thinking about the relationship between human beings and their culture, taking into account especially its temporal dimension. Then I will proceed to 2. the concept of children’s rights in Korczak’s understanding of the child subjectivity; in order to indicate 3. the radical and ethical character of message his thinking.

Dzieciństwo, dziecko i jego dobro w perspektywie Korczakowskiej

This article is an attempt to specify the meanings of a child’s category, childhood and the best interest of the child made on the basis of analysis and interpretation of pedagogical thought of Janusz Korczak and literature analysis. The interpretations and references to Korczak’s thoughts have been there included. The research project were based on document content analysis. Korczak – the figure undoubtedly the foreground in Polish pedagogy and the world doctrine of children’s rights. It is his pedagogical practice and contemporary reception of his thoughts, made by educators and lawyers, that will become the basis for seeking the meanings of categories on which the modern doctrine of children’s rights and the system of their protection are built. As a result: the principle of the best interest of the child as a determinant of the pedagogical practice of Janusz Korczak has been normalized in the Convention on the Rights of the Child and other acts of Polish and international law. This category is interpreted dynamically in the context of changes in the discourses of a child and childhood functioning in social and political life, especially in the area of education and upbringing of the young generation. As a pedagogical category, it is visible in the reflection of many pedagogues as a central category, most often identified with the goal of all adult activities for the child.

Głosy współczesnych dzieci w sprawie "Kajtusia Czarodzieja" – śladem Korczakowskiego pisarskiego eksperymentu

Janusz Korczak engaged children in writing novels intended for them. His writing experiments consisted in directly transferring children’s ideas to the paper, correcting and reworking the stories under the influence of the listeners’ comments, removing and cutting fragments of the text at their request. Following Korczak’s method, a reconstruction of understanding by modern children of created 85 years ago novel “Kajtuś Czarodziej” was made. Based on focus interviews, it was established that the fairytale context of reading is read by children on a multithreaded basis, filtered by reference to the present day, critically evaluated by older children. The linguistic layer is acceptable, while the transfer of the fairytale aspect to real life does not suit the contemporary young recipients. The children’s suggestions regarding the new plots of reading were mainly of mimetic character in relation to the original.

Wyjść poza krąg. O przywracaniu pedagogiki Marii Rogowskiej-Falskiej i Wiery Schmidt

In the article, based on theoretical assumptions about framing mechanisms taken from the work of Georg Lakoff and the Polish tradition of post-dependence research, the author conducts a comparative analysis of cases of reframing the hegemonic and strongly patriarchal narratives regarding the pedagogical legacy of Janusz Korczak and Ivan Jermakov. As a result of systemic changes after 1989, narratives so far suppressed have come to the fore. It applies to minority voices, especially female voices. The comparative analysis took into account the voices of female educators from Poland and the Soviet Union – Maria Rogowska-Falska and Vera Schmidt. The main questions concern how hegemonic pedagogical discourses may erode and whether the processes of redefining pedagogical thought in Poland are analogous to trends in other countries of Central and Eastern Europe? The study points to far-reaching analogies of the processes of reframing in Poland and Russia. This has its consequences for our understanding of the achievements of Janusz Korczak in Poland and the roots of psychoanalysis in the Soviet Union.

Wychowanek w „spojrzeniu” wychowawcy – w ujęciu Chiary Lubich i Janusza Korczaka

The article aims to highlight some pedagogical implications of the text of Chiara Lubich Looking at All the Flowers , putting it in dialogue with the work of Janusz Korczak. The universality inherent in Chiara Lubich’s exhortation to “look at all the flowers”, can be found in the exhortation of Korczak to “respect all the ages of life”, as a consequence of the high consideration that he has of the child and his rights, first of which the right to respect. The depth of meaning that “looking at” assumes in this text of Chiara Lubich, where it becomes synonymous with “loving”, can be found declined and deployed in pedagogical terms in the work of Korczak. The juxtaposition of some passages of the texts of these two authors reveals profound assonances in the anthropological foundations of their thought.

L’educando nello sguardo dell’educatore: spunti nel pensiero di Chiara Lubich e di Janusz Korczak

The article aims to highlight some pedagogical implications of the text of Chiara Lubich Looking at All the Flowers, putting it in dialogue with the work of Janusz Korczak. The universality inherent in Chiara Lubich’s exhortation to “look at all the flowers”, can be found in the exhortation of Korczak to “respect all the ages of life”, as a consequence of the high consideration that he has of the child and his rights, first of which the right to respect. The depth of meaning that “looking at” assumes in this text of Chiara Lubich, where it becomes synonymous with “loving”, can be found declined and deployed in pedagogical terms in the work of Korczak. The juxtaposition of some passages of the texts of these two authors reveals profound assonances in the anthropological foundations of their thought.

Dr Janusz Korczak: paediatrician, children's advocate and hero.

Dr Janusz Korczak: paediatrician, children's advocate and hero.

Refleksje nad zastosowaniem korczakowskich metod partycypacyjnej pracy z dziećmi w obozach dla uchodźców

The aim of the article is to outline the specifics of places and spaces – refugee camps and centers, where children constitute the majority. Through reference to activities implemented there and oriented towards children, we discuss their problematic character connected with e.g. the absence of participatory, rights-based approach (art. 12 CRC) that serves children’s emancipation and equality. In the second part of the article, we propose the implementation of Janusz Korczak’s methods – solutions for participatory work with children (“underprivileged” groups), which seem both timeless and universal. An ethical and contextual adaptation or inspiration based on Korczak’s methods in work designed for backgrounds connected with children remaining in closed and semi-closed systems, provides a chance for children’s basic participation in decision-making in matters that concern their lives. At the same time, it is an opportunity to learn children’s opinions and an expression of respect for the child as a per-son who functions here and now, in the place and space of his or her temporary stay – a refugee camp, where an international protection system for children and adults is far from effective.