This research study concerns the trends in the lifelong learning of teachers including self-education as a form of teacher personal development. It explores the importance, role and objectives of lifelong learning, andragogic pedeutology, as well as the trends and further education of possibilities of teachers in Slovakia with regards to the forms of learning, qualification education and continuing education. We present the findings of a research survey on the educational needs of secondary vocational school (SVS) teachers as one of the results of the KEGA 005 DTI-4/2013 project in the study. We also present the research objectives, research questions, research sample of SVS teachers, research methods and instruments. In addition to presenting the findings of the current and updated education needs of SVS teachers in the sample and their interpretation, we formulate the research conclusions on the educational needs of SVS teachers as one of the results of the KEGA 005 DTI-4/2013 project.
Resilience is an individual’s capacity to recover, adapt, and keep mental balance and normal functioning when exposed to significant adversity. This competence plays an important role in one’s life because it increases the probability of achieving success in various spheres of life. Schools can foster students’ resilience by providing a positive school environment and a sufficient number of protective factors, but it is the subjective interpretation of conditions and experiences rather than the exposure to them that is significant. The main objective of this research was to study to what extent school satisfaction, i.e. subjective interpretation of the school climate, influenced the level of students’ resilience. Not all our findings are compatible with the results of other studies. Despite the limits of our research, its results can serve as a basis for further work as not much has been done in the field of resilience research in Slovakia.
The proposed study deals with early reading literacy development of pre-school age children. A special attention is paid to the promotion of reading in family environment. Children’s relationship to reading starts developing before entering school, therefore, we consider families, alongside with intentional reading development in kindergartens, to be the basic indicators of the development of children’s relationship to reading and to books in general. The results of our quantitative research reflect the current situation in reading literacy development of pre-school age children in Slovakia, in particular families, and from the point of view of both the participating parents and their children.
In this follow up paper, the ribovirocell concept from the first part of the study is linked to the ontological realm of human reality before, during and in the aftermath of COVID19. During this fluid space-time, human reality is multi-faceted and often very complicated. The authors present a division of the reality into fundamental reality and situational reality. Fundamental reality is based on the (physical) laws of nature such as the speed of light as a fundamental physical constant. This reality spans beyond the course of time as perceived by humans, which is beyond the duration of a single or multiple human lifespans and beyond the duration of the COIVD19 pandemic. Next to fundamental reality and overlapping with it, exists the situational reality, which humans experience directly themselves during their lifetime(s). Actions of humanity and of individual human beings contribute to the shaping of the situational reality. Examples of the situational reality can be e.g. experiencing atrocities that humanity has committed, humanity’s actions to prevent such atrocities in the future, as well as human progress in eliminating poverty/inequality in the world. At least, some aspects of human lives take place at the boundary between the fundamental and situational reality. The COVID19 pandemic is linked to the concepts and the boundary between the fundamental and situational reality that human’s experiences, such as speed of pandemic impact and shifting nature of reality. The ribovirocell state of one’s self is linked to the way to apply the speed as a threshold concept for resilience in the coronavirus space-time and the post-COVID19 world
The virocell concept of a viral lifecycle maintains that there are two main stages in a virus’s existence. The one is a passive state of a virion, which is not a living entity, and the second one is the virocell. In the state of virocell, a virus infects a host’s cell and hijacks its cellular machinery to achieve its own replication. Depending on the way that a cell reacts to a viral infection, it can have its activities or character as an individual living organism, suppressed completely, to some extent or not at all. In the article, the authors propose that there is analogy between the virocell theory as applied to the SARS-CoV-2 virus lifecycle and the sense of self for humans in the coronavirus pandemic world, and the post-COVID19 space-time. Methodology adopted is a combination of simile of Wittgenstein’s parallel cases, autoethnography, the virocell concept of the SARV-CoV-2 lifecycle and a multi-individual nature of one’s self based on the principles of the assemblage theory. The nature of human existence and the sense of self is defined as a relational notion which is tied to the societal educational standards, phases of developments of a human being and their fluid sense of self. The COVID19 pandemic space-time provides, in fact it demands that humanity undergoes an ongoing education of itself to maintain a productive and resilient movement forward for self and society, as an equivalent of the ribovirocell of a human cell infected with the coronavirus. The notion of speed will have to be unpacked and investigated further, which is done in part in a follow up article and is anchored as the defining characteristics of the post-COVID19 world.
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