The Affective Significance of the School Experiences of Monessori Method Classes Graduates. Research Report

Abstract

The research was conducted over a period of nine months, from September 2013 to April 2014.It consisted of interviews with 94 graduates of the Maria Montessori Primary School No.27 in Lublin, who were educated according to the principles of the Montessori alternative system of education. I analyzed 69 sets of surveys completely filled in by persons meeting the focus group criteria. The questionnaire Self-reflection on Education in the Montessori System prepared on the basis of Hubert Hermans’s Method of Self-confrontation was used for testing the emotional meanings of school experiences. The overview of the indicators that evaluated the school situation can be contained in the statements: You will be responsible for the education of your children. You assume that you will choose the Montessori system, as well as that the general and ideal experiences showed that both basic motives highlighted by Herman were active (high average values of S and O), and that their activity was balanced (no statistically significant differences between S and O).

General as well as ideal experiences connected with school, which were analysed in this paper, presented one of the six possible and yet the most integral type of emotional climate: strength and unity (+HH), in which intense self-awareness occurs with a “pleasant feeling of crossing the boundaries between one’s own self and someone else’s” (Chmielnicka-Kuter, Oleś, Puchalska-Wasyl 2009, p.14).On the basis of this, it was ascertained that the school space was an area of self-assertion for the subjects.