Mr Jerry Mintz has been a leading voice in the alternative school movement for over 30 years. In addition to his seventeen years as a public and independent alternative school principal and teacher, he has also helped found more than fifty public and private alternative schools and organizations.

He has lectured and consulted in more than twenty-five countries around the world. In 1989, he founded the Alternative Education Resource Organization and has helped found over 50 alternative schools and organizations.

He has been on National Public Radio, the major TV networks, in The New York Times, Newsday, and many other publications. He was Editor-in-Chief for the Handbook of Alternative Education, and the Almanac of Education Choices.

He is the author of No Homework and Recess All Day: How to Have Freedom and Democracy in Education and editor of Turning Points: 35 Visionaries in Education Tell Their Own Stories.

Kageki Asakura is working both in practices and in the study of democratic education. He has worked at the oldest free democratic school in Japan and founded the first Japanese democratic university, Shure University. Asakura is Dean there. He has been an active member of IDEC for two decades. Kageki studies and writes about democratic education, history of education and ethnography of youth. He is an also leading scholar of “self-ology”, a study about the self and by the self.

Retired state secondary school Deputy/Acting Headteacher and School Inspector in the UK As an inspector he worked for Summerhill School when the UK government attempted to close it. He has tried to support democratic schools in the Netherlands, Denmark and Bavaria when they have got into difficulties with their inspectors.

He has a bachelor’s degree in education from Oxford University and a master’s degree in educational research from Exeter University. He has been a consultant, researcher, adviser to the Council of Europe, the governments of the UK and other countries in Education for Democratic Citizenship and Human Rights Education. He has been a visiting fellow at Sussex University for student voice in schools and has lectured on student democracy and participation at London University.

He researched and wrote the report for the UK government that demonstrated positive outcomes when democratic and participative approaches are implemented in English state secondary schools. This became known as ‘The Hannam Report’ which has been cited in over 70 further research studies and reports.

Marko got interested in educational change through reading the Summerhill book over 20 years ago. He applied to the Helsinki University teacher education in order to be able to influence how teachers are educated. After half a year of studies, as a student he initiated a project, which ended up becoming an alternative teacher education line at the University. After the new teacher education was started, he began visiting various democratic schools around the world in order to start his own school in Finland.

In 2005 Marko started the first democratic school in Finland, called Phoenix School (Feeniks-koulu in Finnish). It was a small experimental school which ran for three years. During this experience Marko got many requests from people around Finland if they could join the school online. So, in 2009 Marko started planning the Phoenix School Online, which opened in 2011 and is still running.

In 2016 Marko hosted the [email protected] conference in Finland. During the preparations for the conference Marko started a school/learning center in Pakistan together with a local STEP-organization aimed for the slum area children who don’t have access to schools or education. In June 2016 Marko and the STEP-organization started the second center and now they’re planning a third one. The centers are open in the evenings, since many of the children need to work during day time. There are laptop computers with good Internet connection available for the students so they can teach themselves in small groups. In both centers there is one voluntary teacher/tutor who helps the students to get started.

Marko has been promoting democratic education since the 1990s. He was part of a group that started a student centered teacher education in Helsinki University in 1996. He then moved on to start his own school and founded the first democratic school called Phoenix School in Finland in 2005. The school was running for three years. In 2010 he started working on an online learning platform called Knowledge Constructors, which is specifically designed for student centred education and in 2012 he started the Phoenix Online School. In 2016 he hosted the International Democratic Education Conference (IDEC) in Finland. Also the same year together with a Pakistani educator, Arif Paul, they started three learning centers for street children in Pakistan.

For Peter and Christel the search for alternative paths in education began in 1998 as they have just returned to Netherlands from Oman. Their eldest eight-year-old daughter went to school, and soon her parents noticed that she was depressed every time the holidays were over. Hearing from his daughter, “I`d rather die than go to school,” Peter deeply immersed himself in the study of learning issues, Dutch education legislation and human rights. Peter and Christel founded the school by the Sudbury school model (with no teachers, no exams, no lessons and no grades). Peter is an active participant in the Council of the European Democratic Education Community (EUDEC) and is an author of the book "Beyond Coersive Education" (2016), which is available in several languages and has recently been translated into Russian to be published soon. Now the children of Peter and Christel are adults, and they themselves stayed to work at the Sudbury School in Harderwick.

After defending her PhD thesis in geology, Peter`s wife, Christel, worked in the oil industry until 2003, when she and her husband opened their first school in Soest. Understanding the disadvantages of existing educational theories, Christel began working on her second PhD thesis, exploring the scientific basis for the self-directed education.

Peter and Christel publish their experience, advise activists seeking to bring the Sudbury model to their schools, regularly give lectures and perform as speakers at international events focussing on alternative education.

Peter and Christel are active participants in the EUDEC Council who founded three Saudbery system schools in the Netherlands and published books and scientific work on self directed education.

At the IDEC/EUDEC conference Anna will seak about the evolution of maturity, about how we “remain ourselves” all our life, without even knowing it… You will hear about adult maturation, the main stages of becoming "yourself". How does it feel subjectively and how does it objectively look at different ages - physical and psychological - in childhood, adolescence, adulthood, maturity.

What needs, desires, interests, and values drive us while we are growing? How does this affect the behavior and relationships of children and adults? What are we aware of and what do we fail to notice due to the "age" features? Each stage of growth harbors specific keys to who we are. Parents, teachers and leaders grow up together and next to their children, students and staff. This is an exciting journey and a great life challenge at the same time!

Anna is an amazing speaker, listening to her you will recognize yourself smiling, your habits and manifestations, noticed by her. Anna helps many organizations, including those related to education, to realize themselves as a system, to build up a strategy of non-violent communication and inspiring group work in teams, organizations and even in the families.

We highly recommend to listen to her about the models of parenthood, learning and management styles. The experience of our cooperation in the past shows that interaction with Anna opens eyes to many seemingly obvious things in the society around us and turns out to be not only useful for many, but also healing in solving the problems with ourselves and others.

The school is quite small with its 2 classes, but the ideas, principles and methods of the `BerkoShko` school have already spread widely and found many followers in Ukraine. `BerkoShko` does not open new classes, the number of children remains unchanged, although there is a long waiting list of people willing to join the project. Why? Because, according to Valentina, you can only make happy a maximum of 200-250 children on your own, and to achieve this you will have to give all you can give. However, you can go another way and inspire teachers and parents across the country to create their own schools build on the same ideas. In this way the number of children made happy will grow exponentially and not just by another handful.

Valentina carefully collects the experience of `BerkoShko`, analyses and structures it in order to support the new venturers of alternative education in developing their projects. She records webinars, develops training courses, writes books and travels the country with seminars. Dozens of alternative schools, camps and out-of-school educational projects in Ukraine were inspired or supported by `BerkoShko` and personally by Valentina Merzhiyevskaya.

At IDEC, Valentina will speak about one of the most demanded elements of `BerkoShko` - about `Tereveni`. Tereveni is a psychological club aimed at learning selfconciosnes, awareness of emotions, empathy and dealing with conflicts. She will also touch many other topics ranging from development of the responsible social attitude to the transfer of the cultural code.

Attending Valentina’s talk at IDEC is definitely a gain for every participant. We are sure you will appreciate the atmosphere of wisdom, soft confidence, kindness and reason around this amazing woman.

In her diverse and important practice, Diana helps teenagers to live through their complex emotions, such as fear, jealousy, anger, offense, grief, depression, shame... She helps adults (parents and teachers) to understand their role in this process. The atmosphere of mutual trust and feeling of safety is particularly important for Diana and allows all participants of the club to speak openly and sincerely.

With the permission of the participants themselves, Diana summarizes their experiences and opinions to share with a wide audience. The results of her valuable analysis and the polls are showing what is important or difficult for modern tenagers today. They are covering such relevant topics as gadgets, bad habits, restriction of freedom, ethics of behavior on the Internet and the social media for both parents and children, etc. This invaluable experience helps many parents and teachers to build trusting relationships with children.

Her professional expertise and the power of her sincere desire to untie the tightly tied knots of misunderstanding between teenagers and adults works wonders. Many parents will support us in the opinion that Diana will enrich any event as a speaker. We highly recommend attending Diana`s talk to everyone for whom building a trusting relationship with teenagers is a relevant topic.

Joseph was an author of the idea and a founder of People Parliament Movement. He had been working for 27 years to build children's parliament around India and later around the world. For now the idea of children's parliament has reached several million children through his work. And Joseph is still totally enthusiastic!

Children's parliament gathers kids from 6 to 18 from one neighborhood community or one school and gives them the direct power in the whole process of identifying their own problems and needs, discussing them, taking decisions to set them right, charting out suitable action plans for the same, implementing the action plans and monitoring and evaluating the implementation and so on.

Towards this, this project promotes the platforms for children where they can cultivate basic human relationship among them in their own neighborhood community and the importance of children’s participation in self-governance and in the above whole processes by educating, organizing and empowering them which alone will lead to the much needed social change through a program called “Children Parliament”.

Now Joseph also works as a Professional Trainer and coach, basing his work in this field on the democratic approach and procedures.