The Pluralist Paradigm in the Czech Educational Process: Teaching about Collective Identities and Democracy in the Constructivist Educational Project

Result code in IS VaVaI

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Result on the web

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DOI - Digital Object Identifier

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Result language

angličtina

Original language name

The Pluralist Paradigm in the Czech Educational Process: Teaching about Collective Identities and Democracy in the Constructivist Educational Project

Original language description

The theoretical framework of the Czech education has experienced very significant changes over the last thirty years reflecting the main social transformation from the post-totalitarian values to the democratic ones. However, the switch from the authoritarian teaching approach to the liberal one has been frequently hindered not only by the preservation of post-socialist culture, but also by the implicit legacy of the traditional language structures regarding the interpretation of common values. In this regard, the non-reflected usage of concepts of national identity and democracy is still very common and controversial at the same time, since the ongoing research has proved that the combination of liberal pluralist educational paradigm with the traditional nationalist language might result into very serious consequences for the student’s self-understanding and their evaluation of collective identity patterns. When Istvan Bibó warned that the future Central European society would not be able to deal with otherness, the current Czech educational process demonstrates that the ‘closed’ and primordial concept of collective identification is still prevailing and that both teachers and students are dependent on the traditional categories of collective classification which might be misleading for heterogeneous societies in the 21st century. Hence, the reinterpretation of the national educational curriculum in a more pluralist way which would enrich the current predetermined understanding of the aforementioned concepts requires both theoretical and practical reflection. In this regard, the paper will analyse the current trends in the new project of civic education realized in Czech schools, which has enforced the constructivist patterns of symbolic interactionism and Popper’s anti-essentialism and thus enabled to teach the crucial concepts such as national identity or democracy in a more open and self-embedded way. Taking all the theoretical notions into account, the paper will also offer inspiring methodological materials from the aforementioned project for teaching controversial topics such as liberal freedom, ideological background of democracy or pluralist interpretation of collective identities in the highly delicate case of Czech historical coexistence with national minorities.

Czech name

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Czech description

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Type

C - Chapter in a specialist book

CEP classification

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OECD FORD branch

60101 - History (history of science and technology to be 6.3, history of specific sciences to be under the respective headings)

Project

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Continuities

I - Institucionalni podpora na dlouhodoby koncepcni rozvoj vyzkumne organizace

Publication year

2022

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Book/collection name

Non-Inclusive Education in Central and Eastern Europe Comparative Studies of Teaching Ethnicity, Religion and Gender

ISBN

978-1-350-32526-5

Number of pages of the result

21

Pages from-to

41-61

Number of pages of the book

248

Publisher name

Bloomsbury

Place of publication

London

UT code for WoS chapter

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