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 IDEC@EUDEC 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.