Importance of and need for intercultural education according to students: future teachers

Abstract

The aim of this article was to address the subject of intercultural education understood as a problem, which, in the process of educating students who will become teachers, should be taken into consideration in such a scope to make sure that the future teachers can support their pupils in the formation of desired attitudes and behaviours in their relations with individuals of different cultural, national and ethnic backgrounds. The first section deals with the importance of intercultural education in the context of the meaning of the following terms: multiculturalism, culture and education. It refers to selected scopes and interpretation of interculturalism and intercultural education. Within such a framework, the problem of the importance of and the need for intercultural education is discussed based on the opinions of pedagogy students and according to the results of the author’s own surveys conducted at the University of Opole (UO) and the Slovakia-based University of Žilina (UŽ) during the academic year of 2016–2017.