Project Teaching Method as a Method for Intercultural Education

There are several methods on how to teach Intercultural Competence. One of the most effective ones and at the same time providing many possibilities of cooperation with students is the method of project teaching. On one hand it enables to flexibly adjust class schedule and applied teaching approach to a particular group of students and their needs, but also to take into account the characteristics of a specific group of students. On the other hand, such method offers a possibility to control the students' participation in the process of class preparation.

For the first time, the method of project teaching was defined and described in 1918 by an American educator – William Hear Kilpatrick in his essay "The Project Method". In Poland such method was introduced in the interwar years, however in the beginning it was not a recommended method. Today it is considered to be one of the most attractive methods of teaching.

Within the framework of the university class of intercultural competence a project named "Youth study visit in the Memorial Site Dachau" in November 2013 was conducted. It aimed to constitute a complementary method of developing the Intercultural Competence by students. A question of the memory, seen both as a component shaping the individual and group identity and potentially conflictual competent in situations in which we deal with strongly stereotypical images of relations between representatives of different nations, which were struggling with one another in the past. The "Youth study visit in the Memorial Site Dachau" intended to sensitize participants on the issues connected with the individual and group memory. The project method is a modern method of practical teaching.

The project teaching broadens the participants' knowledge through their active participation in the work. Such method is a part of a modular teaching, within which other wider and higher projects and in the framework of these – also smaller scientific projects could be realized.

Project coordinators:

dr Kinga Anna Gajda

mgr Aneta Pazik

Fragmentary results were presented during the 3rd Cyprus International Conference on Educational Research, 30 January-01 February 2014, Near East University, Lefkosa, North Cyprus

Photo: Andrew Carr from Flickr, on the CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 licence.