About this website

leplole-maef

Financed and offered by the Montes Alti Educational Foundation (Montes Alti Educational Foundation), the Pôle website (lepole.education) is now officially open to all. The website is free, pedagogical, validated and interactive.

Open to all

We have intentionally developed a website for which no inscription, username or password are required. This is to maintain a non-institutional environment surrounding the website and ensure each individual can freely access the website.

Free

As the goal of the Pôle website is not to generate profit it will remain entirely free and contain no advertisements.

Pedagogical

Thought of and written by practitioners for practitioners. The Pôle website follows an approach combining theory and real life experiences. The articles which are currently available are intended to continually evolve, be enriched and multiply in number.

Validity

  • The content of each subject explored is supervised and validated in collaboration with academics or experts in the respective fields. These contributors provide a variety of perspectives and complementary information, which is delivered in a language accessible to all, especially practitioners.

  • The proposed links and biographies are also sorted and validated by Pôle contributors.

Interactive

The Pôle website does not only seek to provide a variety of contributions, articles and links. It is intended to also act as platform for its users. To this end the website has a “contact” page and is present on social media (Facebook-Twitter-Linkedin). Through these various means of communication users are invited to propose new content, bring interesting subjects to our attention, make comments and provide their opinions.

Our intentions & expectations

The website’s roots are Swiss, or more precisely Genevois. The site has been developed by a team of people, and through their network of colleagues working in the department of public education in Geneva, private schools of Geneva (AGEP) and universities.

The location of our roots comes naturally through the City’s historical involvement in the development of education (Rousseau, Claparède, Ferrière, Piaget…). Even today internationally renowned researchers in education (scientific and pedagogical), pedagogical movements and diverse experiences are present in the City’s public and private education systems. Furthermore, one must not forget the recent development of university interfaculty centers such as the Interfaculty Center of Affective Sciences or the Neuroscience Center, which can only be of great interest to educators.

Our wish is to open the website to an international audience, thus giving it an international dimension. For this reason the website is also available in English.

The desire to develop an international dimension for the website is supported by our vision to see the materials made available to more researchers with experiences in diverse countries as well as our aspiration to expand the dimension of the history of education, it’s movements and pedagogical paradigms to other countries and continents. At the present time the English version of the website is mainly composed of translations of French articles. In the future similar content will be available as well as articles originally published in English. This way the two versions of the website will complement one another.

Articles content

With regards to the content of the articles, they are to be understood as references, pointers, propositions or introductions to particular topics. Our intention is not to “sell” one scientific pedagogical approach, promote certain movements more than others, become subservient to a specific school of thought and even less to develop “truths”. Our only aim through providing the content is the following: mutualize the rich resources of pedagogy, making them shared property to benefit a wide audience.

The Pôle has chosen the compass as its symbol. It is the compass that allows each person to find their initial bearings, define their orientation, and then to follow their own path.