Inclusive Learning and Educational Equity 5

 Methods of Collaborative and Individualized or Diversified 
Instruction at SZD
The current pedagogical practices in the school are the result of the specific institu-
tional development described in section “
Schulzentrum Donaustadt: The Institutional 
Development of the School
”. School practices will be presented as described in 
documents of the school. Most were written for public presentation of the activities; 
others arose through the internal school development process. This shows the lack 
of academic documentation of inclusive school development. In the documentation, 
the school development team describes the didactic concepts that they use in rela-
tion to twentieth century reform pedagogy, with references to, among others, 
Montessori, Petersen, and Freinet (source: internal school documents).
Simone Abels, a researcher in the didactics of natural sciences, described the 
experimental forms of learning at SZD in her subject (Abels, 
2015
). As Abels 
reported, research-based learning is implemented in two organizational forms called 
“box lessons” (“Schachtelstunden”) and “learning workshops” (“Lernwerkstatt”) 
(ibid. 141). During “box lessons,” students can choose from a number of explora-
tion and learning settings. More than a hundred materials are prepared for an overall 
topic, e.g., water, insects, or light and color. The boxes contain instructions, 
M. Proyer et al.

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materials for activities, and self-directed control of solutions. The students choose 
the actual topics in the given area and whether they want to work alone, in pairs or 
in groups depending on the topic. At the end of an activity, the students write a pro-
tocol. In regular sequences, activities of the past months are reflected on with the 
teacher and an evaluation sheet is written by teachers and students in a collaborative 
manner. The materials recall the type of material used in the area of “cosmic learn-
ing” in Montessori pedagogy and the teaching interactions recall the well- known 
interactions found in the pedagogy of Peter Petersen and Celestin Freinet.
The “learning workshop” enables days-long, research-based, interdisciplinary, 
autonomous explorative learning on the actual school premises. The whole class 
works on one topic for 4 days. The room where the “box lessons” normally take 
place, referred to as the “learning workshop,” is a room fully equipped with free 
accessible materials to inspire students to develop their own questions (ibid.). Each 
of the activities forms part of one of the overall topics as described above which can 
be from either the natural or social sciences. Again, students choose whether they 
want to work on these topics alone, with a partner or in a group of three or four 
persons. Teachers supervise the work of the students and help them to find appropri-
ate questions and projects. The students might work for several days on a topic, 
using a research diary and presenting their results to the other students at the end.