On September 15-17, the Director of the PNU EcoSystem Centre, Professor Olena Budnyk, took part in the annual methodological seminar of the Section of Christian Pedagogy of the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAS) on the topic: “Identity of the educator, teacher, and Christian Education / Tożsamość wychowawcy, pedagoga i pedagogiki chrześcijańskiej”, which took place in Kazimierz Dolny over the Vistula (Republic of Poland). The seminar, which was attended by about 50 researchers, was organized by Professor Marian Nowak, Department of General Pedagogy at the Faculty of Social Sciences of John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin.
The three-day seminar focused on general problems of identity in the context of interdisciplinarity, in particular the identity theory of the American sociologist and psychoanalyst E. Erikson. Considerable attention was paid to the development of teacher identity (theorist and practitioner), including the goals of Christian pedagogy and its current challenges.
In her speech on “National and Pedagogical Identity: Consolidation Model (Ukraine’s Experience in the Realities of War),” Olena Budnyk presented some of the identity studies of Ukrainian and Polish scholars, outlined the areas of identity manifestation in the professional, moral, religious, socio-political aspects. The professor focused on the substantiation of the tasks and specifics of the formation of national and European identity; she emphasized the importance of rationality of choice, which is determined by the necessity for deep understanding and analysis of the historical past, identification opportunities of Ukrainians in the real conditions of war, noting that “these events became an unprecedented tragedy but at the same time an inspiration for the transformation of national identity”; singled out the model of a teacher’s pedagogical identity through the prism of general models of identity in the context of the formation of an individual trajectory of personality development, considered the categories of the pedagogical identity of a prospective teacher (student), the professional identity of a specialist (educator), etc. The discussion, among other things, touched upon some pedagogical aspects of Ukrainian-Polish cooperation.