On Tuesday, August 28, 2018, an international conference called STEM Education and the Inclusion of Cultural Differences was held at the premises of the CPU in Nitra at Trieda A. Hlinku street. The conference was organized by the CPU in Nitra in cooperation with the University of Hradec Králové, Czech Republic, as an activity of the international project Erasmus + IncluSMe, project number 2016-1-DE01-KA203-002910. The coordinating institution of the IncluSMe project is the University of Education in Freiburg, Germany, with whom the CPU in Nitra started a successful collaboration in 2010 with the projects of 7RP PRIMAS and Comenius COMPASS.

The International Conference on STEM Education and the Inclusion of Cultural Differences was attended by university teachers preparing prospective teachers, primary and secondary school teachers, researchers in Environmentalistics and Ecology, and the representatives of various institutions involved in the education in this field.

The key departments of the InclusSMe project are the Department of Mathematics and the Department of Ecology and Environmental Studies of the FNS CPU in Nitra, whose staff prepared the conference professionally and organizationally. Within the framework of the program, the participants heard three main lectures on the current outcomes of the IncluSMe project in the areas of: the cultural aspects of inclusion, the teaching of Mathematics and Natural Sciences in extracurricular activities, and contemporary ecological problems in teaching in the context of the inclusion of cultural differences. Other plenary lectures provided insights into inclusion on the basis of different experience of the lecturers or different aspects of inclusion. One of the plenary lectures was presented by PhDr. Miroslava Čerešníková, PhD. from the Institute of Romological Studies and the Vice-Dean of FSSHC CPU in Nitra. Very valuable and interesting was the lecture of the teacher Mgr. Zuzana Kijácová from Vyčapy-Opatovce Elementary School, who shared with the participants her experience in teaching mathematics of children from Christian families from Iraq, who arrived in the village in 2016.

A similar conference within the framework of the IncluSMe project will take place in the spring of 2019 at the University of Nicosia, Cyprus. Project activities include also summer schools for prospective teachers. In June 2018, five students of Ecology and Environmental Sciences attended summer school in Prague, and in the upcoming academic year 2018/2019, the Summer School of Inclusive Pedagogy in Mathematics Teaching will be organized by the University of Vilnius, Lithuania and will be attended by a group of five students of Mathematics Teaching from FNS CPU in Nitra.

Text: doc. PaedDr. Soňa Čeretková, PhD., IncluSMe project coordinator

Photogallery: Bc. Ľubomír Balko, Office for Development, Informatisation and Marketing Communication