SOKA EDUCATORS INTERNATIONAL NETWORK Volume VI, Issue 3 Seeking to Build a Community of Life through Humanistic Education

Experience by Margit Urbassek, Vienna, Austria

My name is Margit and I have been chanting for 20 years in Vienna, Austria. I want to share my experience about how I changed my whole working situation as well as my teaching through chanting and through being an active member in SGI Austria.

In the beginning of my chanting I was working in an Austrian primary school as a teacher. I suffered a lot. This was just after I had come back from Great Britain where I had spent a year attending the international New Age community called Findhorn. I found the school system in Vienna to be very rigid.

In England I got in touch with alternative teaching forms. I love children very much and what I saw in the school system conflicted with what I had learned. I had very bad experiences with teacher colleagues in Austria who from my perspective treated the children terribly. So my lifestate got rather low. I felt that I wanted to support the children, but as long as I felt stuck in this school system which suppressed teachers and children, I didn´t know how to help really them.

When I started chanting I felt the pressure inside myself get bigger and I felt even more terrible. I talked often with my seniors in faith and I heard that this is all my karma. That I can change this. I wanted to leave the school system and felt that I could not be an adequate teacher there. Also I discovered by regularly dancing in studios, that I started to love dance and that I should teach in this direction. Plus I am certified in classical and shiatsu massage and I was very good at this as well.

The senior leaders told me: "NO, don't leave school, that's the place where your karma is, and I would take it with me if I left the school. I rather should chant to change something in the school and to change my situation." This was very hard for me, but I trusted the senior leaders 100 percent. I chanted sometimes inside the whole morning, to endure the situations with bad collegues and the terrible atmosphere in school.

I felt inside three abilities : I loved supporting the children, I loved dancing and I loved doing massage and bodywork for people. I realized I didn't want to teach children writing and reading. I felt that I wanted to support their artistic abilities and creativity.

I was also the only SGI primary school teacher in Austria at the time. I saw that I had to change a lot of karma.

I chanted to go to a different school and through chanting I said to myself, I will only take a teaching position in a new school where I feel free in my teaching and feel good about the working situation. In Austria at that time you had to take what you could get in the school system but I said to myself after many daimoku: I am the one who is choosing to make this change happen. I chanted Nam Myoho Renge Kyo and was convinced in the meantime I am in the perfect place for kosen rufu.

I came upon a different school where my colleagues were much more open and where the headmaster there, a very nice woman, understood me and really supported me as a young teacher.

The first time I felt good going to my work as a teacher. Through chanting and through a colleague there, I found a contact to a new Montessori education course and I immediately took part on this course. In the Montessori education I could change my whole attitude towards teaching in primary school and I felt for the first time that my inside task is very much to teach children of this age, and I felt free and not unencumbered by the Austrian school system. I felt myself as a human and as a teacher who really loves teaching and the children. I felt I had the freedom to teach really what I want.

Chanting supported me during my education very much. Mr. Claus Kaul, my Montessori teacher, who is now a friend for life, supported me to stand up for my special teaching abilities which seemed to be really in artistic expression and dance. He supported me to have the courage to change the school system from inside . So I started in my school several dance classes with daimoku as the base and also with Montessori knowledge.

The dance classes increased and I had sometimes 50 children coming on their own accord in the afternoons. The classes were a real success and I definitely demonstrated that I have the ability to teach creative dance to children. Sometimes I came with an African drummer to school or with other artists I knew, to show students examples of creative dance and different styles. Obviously such a thing was something totally new in the primary school. I got then four schools to do the same program and the children began to give little performances on a stage in the city. They were all very successful and I was very grateful.

I kept on for seven years to assist in Montessori education to keep in touch with this educational system and to keep on learning. There were many things I found that were very similar to Makiguchi's educational philosophy. I started to discuss Buddhism with our well known Montessori and reform educator Claus Kaul and gave him books and told him from Soka education. In November 1997 I succeeded to make contact between Claus Kaul, and our Austrian Culture Centre, and our general director Joshio Nakamura.

At this same time Mr. Kaul happened to be looking for a new room for his workshops. And so for four years he taught official Montessori education at our Culture Center. 45 teachers would participate at each one-year course. In this way people came in touch with Sensei's house. I was also able to offer a dance program for each course that to support it. In this way I often came to talk about our Buddhism and what we members are doing in our Culture Centre.

In my own work, more and more children came into my dance classes. My program was already in four schools yet I still had to teach twelve hours in a "normal" classroom. I felt I only lived to work for the school and had no free time.

I realized I either had to reduce all teaching classes or change all teaching hours into dance classes. But to teach "only "dance in a primary school was forbidden from the school law. I chanted again to make the impossible possible. Again my Montessori educator Mr. Claus Kaul helped me out. He said that he knew a headmaster in Vienna who wanted to start a total new reform pedagogical school where he wanted to have dance as it is good for learning. Since then I really have been a dance teacher for creative educational dance and contemporary dance full time for the past ten years.

In short, I have spent the last ten years to building up this school as well as my dance classes which are officially a fixed part of the school schedule. The children learn about dance and learn to create their own dances as well as perform with me. The school and dance classes are my mission for kosenrufu. The children love to have real dance in their program. We are the only school in Austria having a set up like this. The dance classes do also integrate our twenty-five "handicapped people" who live together with all the other children .

The school is a model school now since several years in Austria. Many students from the different pedagogical academies come to us to learn and watch our teaching.

I also presented the Earth Charter exhibition "Seeds of Change" and President Ikeda through this medium in the school. It was a big project and all of the teachers worked with their children on the different themes of the exhibition. A neighbor school took the exhibition next and I helped initiate the teachers there to create a school project from it. Many interesting things came from the work of the children. I also helped to bring the exhibition to the school where my sister works and my sister brought the exhibition to the University Klagenfurt which is south of Vienna and is a student exchange university of the Soka University in Japan.

I have to say that through my Buddhist practice and trying to go with Sensei I found the necessary free space for my pedagogical work with creative children-dance using the principals of Sensei in education which are Wholeness-Creativity and Internationality in our school and make an official contribution to his work as an educator.

I myself feel very happy there as teacher in our school. We colleagues are a very complex working team who always talk honestly with each other and try to respect each other and the children. Daisaku Ikeda said in his essay "Personality and Education," that for him the highest principle in education is the respect of the human being. I have the feeling that this means to do our best for the creativity of our children.

Now after all the activities and ten years building up the school and changing the Austrian school system through daimoku, another deep deep wish is becoming true this year, because I am expecting now my own baby together with my Nigerian boyfriend although my age is 46. Now I start to create my own family with daimoku plus I found a bigger flat 3 minutes from our SGI Culture Centre! I have a pause now in teaching and will think about dance-pedagogic(which means the way how to teach dance) from a different perspective again. I am very grateful that this still could happen and I just can tell that when the time is right the impossible is possible and everybody can become happy in all areas of life with our Buddhist practice and our relationship to Sensei Ikeda.

Vienna, 24. August Margit Urbassek
email - margit.urbassek@aon.at
http://www.lernwerkstatt.or.at/



Photos of Margit's students:














The SOKA EDUCATORS INTERNATIONAL NETWORK is a volunteer project created to inspire educators who are implementing Soka Education in different ways. The Newsletter's new goal is to create a robust network of Soka educators to support the growing development of humanistic education. To be added to the mailing list or removed from it, or to receive back issues, please contact Stephanie Tansey at tansey@usa.net.