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History of Department of Pedagogy

At Comenius University, as at other universities, the field of pedagogy is one of the core disciplines of the Faculty of Education. After the establishment of pedagogical faculties legalized by the Act 100/1946 Coll., no department for the field of pedagogy was created at the Faculty of Education of the Comenius University until the appointment of university professors for this field. After their appointment, from the school year 1947/1948, the Institute of Pedagogy was established and from the school year 1950/1951 this Institute was transformed into the Department of Pedagogy. The Department was to research and theoretically elaborate the problems of education and to implement the results of research and theoretical reflection in the training of future teachers and educators.

However, the turbulence in the institutional, personnel and content of the pedagogical training of teachers and other educational personnel in previous periods intensively and not always positively affected the activities of the Department. These include, in particular, the transformation of the faculties of education in 1952 into higher pedagogical schools and colleges of education, the transformation into pedagogical institutes with the character of universities in 1959, and the return to the original faculties of education in 1964. In these, the Department of Pedagogy always passed from one institution to another as a key department.

After the faculty moved from Trnava to Bratislava in 1986, the profile of the faculty was narrowed down to the preparation of primary education teachers and teachers for special schools. This fact influenced the profiling of the Department of Education. It focused on the pedagogical training of primary education teachers and teachers for special schools, but also on didactics of primary education subjects. Its name was then changed to the Department of Pedagogy and Didactics of Teaching Subjects.

The qualitative development of the Department came after fundamental changes in our society after November 1989. The Department was gradually supplemented by eminent experts from other departments of pedagogy and from practice. A broader, more theoretically informed and dogmatism-free approach to solving the problems of education and training of future teachers began to be applied in its activities.

During the period of the dean of the faculty doc. Bažány, as part of a deeper differentiation of faculty departments, the Department of Pedagogy was divided into two departments, namely the Department of Pedagogy and the Department of Pre-primary and Primary Pedagogy. Even after the division of the department, the two new departments cooperated intensively not only in the field of teacher education, but also in the field of science and research. New departments were also established at this time, for example the Department of Social Pedagogy, which was then held by prof. PhDr. Miron Zelina, DrSc., who was scientifically and research-oriented on a particularly topical problem - creative humanistic education. In 2011, the Department of Pedagogy was merged with the Department of Social Pedagogy and the current Department of Pedagogy and Social Pedagogy was established, which is oriented not only on school pedagogy, but also on the problems of education and education beyond the scope of the Department of Education. Since 2022, the departments have been split, and currently the department bears the name of the Department of Education.