University in front of the necessity of teacher development towards intercultural dialogue and understanding – forms and methods
University in front of the necessity of teacher development towards intercultural dialogue and understanding – forms and methods

Summary/Abstract: A contemporary teacher should represent a high level of consciousness about multicultural challenges involved in senses and meanings, social priorities, political and pedagogical ideas. At present, vocational preparation of disciples of education and their elder colleagues to cope with multicultural problems through intercultural education is weak or doesn’t exist at all. Multicultural courses or workshops that sometimes appear among educational propositions of professional development are rather valuable announcements of further, hopefully compulsory, activities. Today we pose questions about mission, or raison d’etre of our universities. We want to define educational aims and objectives, the range of university freedom or its dependence on business and economy. Neoliberal values, economical language, profits and losses, effectiveness, product and success, business categories of thinking and acting (treating people) profoundly change university communities. Thus traditional university values are dragged out by tough rules of market game. In spite of that, students of pedagogical faculties should get special, deepened and humanistic training. It raises costs of education, but is the best investment for the future. One of the pedagogical areas which should play an important role in that process, is didactics. Organizational forms of education and learning-and-teaching methods are important elements of that pedagogical sub-discipline. The process of updating teachers’ training goes hand in hand with multicultural challenges. New methods, strategies, and shorter techniques, should be applied to correct present situation. That may entail some structural changes inside university’s order. Organizational forms, being influenced by new methods (like Storyline Method and Project Method) and approaches responding to new social problems (developing common abilities to live in multicultural societies) may get a new shape. Teachers need to feel free in applying various forms and methods to reach, in most natural ways for their pupils from different backgrounds, educational aims – aims which will develop each individual personality due to global and humanistic priorities.

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