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Sodobna pedagogika/Journal of Contemporary Educational Studies


Editorial

Let./Vol. 70 (136)
Št./No. 1/2019
Str. 6–8/pp. 158–159
ISSN 0038 0474

The first issue of the Journal of Contemporary Educational Studies of 2019
includes four full-text scientific papers in English. Each addresses a different
topic, with authors from Austria, Hungary, Slovenia and Serbia. Diversity is their
common denominator, although the problems the authors analyse and present in
these articles have global significance.
The first contribution, entitled Different bodies: Normality and embodiments
of disability and gender, authored by Julia Ganterer and Rahel More, addresses
certain aspects of diversity and differences. The authors devote the paper to the
challenge of human diversity being perceived as difference, which eventually results
in othering and social oppression. Ganterer and More claim that pedagogy – as a
science and practice of education – still lacks sensibility for raising, educating and
supporting diverse children and adolescents on equal terms. The authors’ intention is to illustrate a society-critical approach to gender and disability in order to
counter recent developments in educational studies towards individualisation and
away from socialisation as a central pedagogical moment. As the authors put it, the
field must raise awareness that the body is an important medium of subjectivation
that is always interacting with its immediate environment.
The second paper, by Saša Podgoršek, Andreja Istenič Starčič and Brigita Kacjan address issues related to the use of ICT in education by asking the
question, What is the foreign language teacher’s role in ICT-supported instruction?
According to the authors, no studies to date have been conducted in Slovenia on
this particular research field, so the main objective of her research is to analyse
and empirically verify the conception of the teacher’s role in ICT-supported foreign
language (FL) instruction among teachers in primary and secondary education.
Their research results reveal that a large percentage (roughly 80%) of the FL
teachers who participated in the study believed that the teacher’s role has changed
because of the use of ICT. Based on their theoretical and empirical findings, authors
developed their own model of FL teacher roles in ICT-supported FL instruction,
which consists of twelve dimensions and related tasks. Podgoršek, Istenič Starčič
and Kacjan present the model in the paper and believe it can contribute to better
planning and designing of curricula and for FL teacher education in initial teacher-training programmes.
The next paper addresses the history of continental, and specifically Hungarian,
education, as András Németh and Andrea Nagy write in Life reform and reform
pedagogy in Hungary. They explore the relation between both movements at the
end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. As they explain,
life reform is an umbrella term for movements that are critical of modernisation
and whose main features are the desire for a return to nature and naturalness,
self-healing and the reclaiming of lost integrity. New historical pedagogical research
shows that a relatively close connection once existed between the concepts of the
major schools of reform pedagogy and the life-reform movements. Their common



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feature was the concepts’ emphasis on nature, including its proximity and naturalness, as reflected in the pedagogical conception of children and the methods of
education the concepts espoused.
The last contribution is by the Serbian authors Aleksandar Stojanović,
Jelena Prtljaga and Aleksandra Gojkov-Rajić, who write about creativity
encouragement strategies at an early age. As the authors emphasise, creativity is
one of most appreciated of human features and hence is often referred to as a basic
educational task for children of all ages, as well as one of the key competencies
and factors for emancipator potential in a knowledgeable society. Their analysis of
the current literature and research findings on didactic and teaching methodology
strategies for the encouragement of creativity has led the authors to conclude that
several possibilities exist for the application of these strategies at an early age. In
the paper, the authors present several arguments for the empirical validation of
strategies for creativity encouragement, based on broader international research
conducted in Serbia and Romania on the didactic efforts of the Nikola Tesla Centre
(NTC) programme. The NTC’s intention with the programme is to encourage
divergent thinking, with a specific focus on the qualities of thinking, such as fluency, flexibility and originality. The results show that over the course of the NTC
learning and teaching programme, children can be instructed in developing wider
mental structures, in the sense of discovering unusual and remote relations between
stimuli and responses.
Dr Damijan Štefanc
Editor-in-chief