Bringing educational development to Central and Eastern Europe: reflections on twenty years of supporting teachers

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses a sustained effort to introduce and make richer educational development opportunities for colleagues in Slovakia: a community that has common experiences, needs, expectations, access to opportunity and social interactions that follow mutual interest. In this paper, I reflect on the challenges and lessons learnt over two decades while I worked with teachers, educational developers and students taking a community-based, transformation-oriented, and needs-based approach. Over time, this resulted in expanding the community and offering it a broader range of services. The article concludes with four recommendations for those taking community-based approach, including cultivating trust and nurturing hope within the community.

KEYWORDS:

• Central Europe
• community-based academic development
• scholarship of teaching and learning
• trust

Acknowledgments

Academic developers who have generously helped our community to develop and grow include Roisín Curran, Vicky Davies, Graham Gibbs, Lynn McAlpine, Joanna Renc-Roe, Torgny Roxå, Mátyás Szabó and James Wisdom. I would like to thank Alexis Hart, Lynn McAlpine, Torgny Roxå and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on the earlier drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the European Commission [2020-1-SK01-KA203-078299; 2021-1-SK01-KA220-HED-000023528; 2019-1-SK01-KA203-060671].

Notes on contributors

Gabriela Pleschová

Gabriela Pleschová leads the Centre for Scholarship and Teaching in the Faculty of Arts at Comenius University Bratislava where she serves as an associate professor in the Department of Pedagogy. She is a graduate of Oxford University and the co-editor of the books Teacher Development in Higher Education: Existing Programs, Program Impact, and Future Trends (Routledge, 2013), Early Career Academics’ Reflections on Learning to Teach in Central Europe (SEDA, 2018), and Internationalising Teaching in Higher Education: Supporting Peer Learning (TU Delft, 2022). Furthermore, she is a member of the ICED Council and was awarded a Principal Fellowship from the AdvanceHE.