denk:mal Bern

We just arrived in denk:mal in Bern yesterday, which is a selforganised school run voluntarily by some young people,
that -at the moment- offers mostly language courses (German, Spanish, French, Turkish, Arabian), computer courses and some other stuff like cinema and yoga - for free.

The courses are organised by people, who want to teach something just because they like to and everybody can join the course if he/she likes to. If somebody wants to teach something the rooms are open to use without a rent.

denk:mal exists since several years now and has moved several times.
This - too small- building was squatted once, but now they have a contract with the city who owns the house, which allows them to use it for a symbolic rent.
Anyhow it is strange that cities don't pay places like this in general... there should be much more, much better, bigger selforganised schools like this, everywhere!






The group organises with "plenums" every week.
They told us there have been more people involved into the project before,
but now the organising group has been getting smaller.

Anyway many different people use the space and you can hear various languages being spoke all the time. From Switzerdutch and French to Arabic, Spanish and Greek...
It is a place to meet and discuss, a place for integration and cooking together ;-)

Sam already had a computer workshop and went to the Arabic lesson, I am busy reading a book about NPOs and their role in the society. Hopefully we will also have a massage workshop in the next days held by another guest.


Even though some people just regard it as "the occupied house",
for us -as for many others - it is a REAL school , a FREE one, and we are happy to have this infrastructure and interesting books here, as well as some courses ...
-and to have people to talk to about selforganised learning, projectmanagement,
and the problem of passive learning consume-culture-attitude the people are used to from normal schools.
And of course we are happy about having a nice place to sleep very far up the stairs in the attic chambre :-)