HIERD Colleagues Participate at END 2016

Director General Dr József Kaposi presented on the Pedagogical Paradigm Shift in History Teaching and Teacher Training together with Márta Hancock. The poster elaborated on the characteristics of today’s history teaching in Hungary (which still focuses too much on the teacher and the content, which latter contains a great amount of data, events and concepts). Chronological perspective dominates, there is not enough time for exercises developing historical thinking, and new methods for enjoyable learning are not yet used extensively. On the other hand, C21^st pedagogy puts teachers in a learning supporter (facilitator) role, and puts emphasis on the development of key competences: critical thinking, cooperation, communication and creativity. Therefore, the renewal of history teaching is inevitable: experiential teaching should be more prominent, as well as gamification, developmental and interactive tasks. Tools such as storytelling and theatre pedagogy should be included and projects should be realised in teamwork. Teachers can thus develop the competences of their students: they’ll better understand causality, multiperspectivity, they’ll learn how to acquire and process information, and their narrative competence and critical thinking skills will develop. In order to be able to realise this, it is important that initial teacher education prepare to-be history teachers to be competent in theories of history, subject-specific methodology, interactive and discovery learning and to the use of ICT tools in the course of their work. Education for active citizenship and democracy can be the guarantee of the sustainability of democaracies – stated József Kaposi at the end of the presentation.

Viola Bozsik talked about some of the tasks of the HIERD in supporting public education. In the presentation created with Fanni Sólyom-Nagy and Erika Pálfi, they touched upon the new generation of textbooks, the National Public Education Portal, pedagogical professional support, talent support and the pedagogical periodicals of the Institute. The presentation included the model of textbook development and the complimentary functions of the Smart Portal. Viola Bozsik spoke about the reform of teacher education and the talent support programs coordinated by HIERD (Arany János Programs and the National Scientific Student Circles). Besides textbooks, pedagogical periodicals are also a good way to spread methodological innovations and modern pedagogical thinking. Periodicals of the HIERD are all available with free full access at http://folyoiratok.ofi.hu, with Educatio and New Pedagogical Review providing abstracts in English, and Book and Education having a table of contents both in English and in German. These periodicals target different educational groups, and printed copies are provided for free accordingly (for example all primary schools get a copy of New Public Education, and all teacher training institutes get a copy of New Pedagogical Review).

The keynote speaker of the conference was Associate Professor Dr Mojca Juriševič from the University of Ljubljana, who spoke about research on learners’ motivation. Nina Buchanan and Robert Fox, Professors Emeriti from the University of Hawaii gave a special talk on an upcoming book (The Handbook of School Choice), and presented and compared the six main school types in the United States. In the workshop Developing Wisdom in Schools, participants thought together about how students could be made more active agents of their own learning. Parallel sections were held with the titles Teachers and students, Projects and trends and Teaching and learning.

The objective of the END international conference is to support researchers in sharing their results, presenting their activities and thinking together about answers to their challenges. The presentations given at the conference will be published in a conference proceeding, which will be available at http://end-educationconference.org.