The aim of the authors is to respond to the growing demands on the intercultural competence of university teachers due to intensified internationalization pressures on higher education, especially due to the growing number of students and teachers’ international exchanges. They report on an intercultural course design responding to this need, presenting a case study from Slovakia. First, they define the need of intercultural competence of university teachers, especially those teaching in English-medium study programmes. Then they share a) findings from a needs analysis preceding the design of a new curriculum for an intercultural competence course (ICC) at Matej Bel University (MBU) with three aims (development of linguistic, cultural and pedagogic competences); and b) results from action research during piloting the ICC course. A comparison of 2011 and 2018 surveys pointed to the growing dominance of the English language, including an increasing command of English by MBU teachers. The ICC curriculum, tailored to the pre-identified teachers’ needs, proved to be a feasible way of facilitating their intercultural competence. Its implementation revealed persistent prejudices and difficulties associated with overcoming them. It also confirmed a significant deficit in preparing university teachers for their role as intercultural mediators in English-medium courses.
Based on our long-term focus on researching the content of transversal competences, and at the same time changing the forms of education so that they lead to the development of these competences, our primary objective is to design a new framework for mastering transversal competences in a higher education environment. Our approach to transversal competences is proposed as a feasible way to the enhancement of these competences through key processes of critical thinking and reflection.
The aim of this study is to present some aspects of the intersection of religiosity and education predominantly in Slovakia, but also in the Czech Republic (due to the long common history). In the introduction the current concept of religiosity in Czech and Slovak educational context is introduced. The study then consists of three parts. Its first part introduces the religious structure of Slovakia and the Czech Republic, showing the shifts of numbers between census in 1991, 2001 and 2011. The second part will focus on the overview of research studies published after 2008 on religiosity in Slovakia. Lastly, several research studies by the Department of Theology and Catechetics in Banska Bystrica, Slovakia are introduced. The author"s personal project on researching the attitudes towards good and evil as religious construct introduces an alternative methodological way of developing religiosity in European context.
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