From 1 July 2020, the Inklucentrum – Center for Inclusive Education faces a 19-month journey on its own development in supporting schools on the path to inclusive education – from education and guidance to trainers, piloting new educational programs and methods, to networking inclusive organizations in education and policy making in the National Strategy for Inclusive Education. The new modern organization, built on three pillars – advocacy, enlightenment and education, brings a roof and a home for the extremely important topic of inclusive education in Slovakia, thanks to the generous support of the Active Citizens Fund – Slovakia program.
About a project
Towards Inclusive Education project builds the Center, which has the task of providing education and support, especially to teachers, assistants, school support teams, and assistance to schools and municipalities in implementing inclusive education. Practical experience can then be used at the level of national policies in cooperation with the Coalition for Common Education (Inclucoalition) as a partner in creating a national strategy for inclusive education, which will contribute to creating a suitable environment for civil society organizations operating in this area. Our Inklucentrum lives a culture of transparency, openness and humanity, which we believe will be an example to other organizations in the school sector and beyond. We bring together experts in the topic who are involved in setting up the national system. We are invited to make all the major changes in this area at national and international level.
Online teacher education
We are extremely grateful that we are succeeding in fulfilling our goals, thanks to the Active citizens fund. During the Covid pandemic, we adapted to the changing situation in society and promptly launched online adult education. At that time, our teaching team quickly qualified for teachers in the online space. And while the idea of being with participants through an impersonal online world was initially difficult for them, they adapted to the new situation quickly and with extraordinary success. We were able to provide quality education from experts from practice to up to 1432 teachers and professional employees of schools from all corners of Slovakia. In just 7 months, they took part in a total of 70 courses. According to the questionnaires, their satisfaction with the lecturers and topics was excellent. We have created several newsletters, which we make available and distribute for free.
Norwegian method Grunnlaget in Slovakia
The project partner is a major European organization with a 25-year tradition, Pedverket Kompetanse, which operates in Norway and was founded by Gunvor Sønnesyn and Morten Hem. They are the founders of the recognized Grunnlaget method.
City Inclusive School
One of the development activities of the Inklucentrum and the project is to lay the foundation for the concept of model functioning of support in the region in order to provide a real life of inclusive education directly in practice. Inklucentrum believes that we will be able to open an inclusive state school in the Bratislava region within two years with a link to our educational, methodological and later therapeutic center in an effort to provide support with a link to practice. If schools are to learn to live an inclusive culture, they also need to see it and experience and be inspired. We also need to be in constant contact with practice when developing support. And to provide it not only to schools, but also to university students, researchers and counseling facilities. A separate team is actively working on this concept, we have already revealed the first details and we are still working on the others. We also published one of the most important books on humanities education by Carl Rogers: Freedom to learn and also made a video.
We believe that the illustrations of satisfied children in a circle with the teacher will soon become real photographs reflecting the started change in society.
Feedback from teachers – participants in our education:
“Everything is great, just so on, thank you for the great, interactive and always enriching courses of the Inklucentrum and in this particular for the follow-up materials from the webinar, very useful. 🙂 ”
“Amazing, I’m going to buy the recommended literature right away and I also thank my fellow participants for their tips and suggestions. Very important topic, very well grasped, nice lecturer and super inspiring fellow co-participants. I highly recommend it. ”
The Inklucentrum team