FOREWORD
 

Civic Education Project (CEP) is a non-for-profit international educational organization dedicated to assisting universities in Central and Eastern Europe and in the former Soviet Union. CEP is currently active in Albania, Belarus, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Kazakstan, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, and the Ukraine. CEP cooperates with social science, law and humanities faculties through its Visiting Lecturer and Eastern Scholar programs.

In addition to teaching, CEP lecturers cooperate with their host universities in their efforts to improve social science education. They do this through projects which include assisting in the design of new curricula, developing local language teaching materials, securing book donations, seeking research funds, and identifying opportunities for talented faculty and students to receive training outside their home country.

CEP receives generous support from the Higher Education Support Program of the Open Society Institute, the Eurasia Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Smith-Richardson Foundation, the European Commission and other private donors.

In May 1997, in close cooperation with the Department of Education of Attila József University, CEP organized a three-day Workshop at Szeged on Active Learning Strategies in Higher Education. Its main goal was to provide an opportunity for faculty and teachers to learn and share experiences about teaching strategies that encourage the active involvement of students. The meeting started with a one-day in-depth workshop where participants could learn about interactive teaching strategies appropriate for higher education. The second day consisted of a series of concurrent presentations and panel discussions selected by the conference organizers.

Sixty university professors, college teachers and university students came together from eight countries of the region and from the United States. They received a Pre-conference reader containing articles and other materials for active learning in the classroom. It will serve as a useful resource when the participants implement ideas in their own classrooms.

The event was generously supported by HESP (Higher Education Support Program of the Open Society Institute) and UNESCO CEPES.

The chapters of this book are written by Workshop presenters and are based on the interactive presentations which took place in Szeged. These papers are mostly practice oriented ones and we believe that they could engender further discussion and cooperation.

The challenges of the democratization process and economic integration into world markets demand that the region's leaders of tomorrow acquire knowledge and skills for their roles. The educational system of the region has historically placed students in a very passive learning role where rote learning rather than critical or creative thinking and competition rather than cooperation have been the norm. The traditional classroom procedure has consisted almost exclusively of formal lecturing by professors and examinations requiring the regurgitation of facts.

Although lecturing will always play an important role in university and college education, it must be supplemented by approaches that will enable students to collaborate with others, apply information to new situations, solve a variety of problems as well as a wide array of other activities. Democracy requires participants who can evaluate ideas critically rather than blindly follow others. Collaboration facilitates positive inter-group relations and the kind of pro-social behaviors required to understand someone else's perspective and to resolve conflicts. Only if students have opportunities for these kinds of experiences in the classroom now are they likely to apply such approaches in actual situations later.

The idea of the Workshop was brought up by Sandra Renegar and Arthur Spring in the Fall of 1996, both CEP lecturers teaching Education in Hungary. They put an extraordinary effort into the preparation and the organization of the event. Sandi herself worked very hard on the Pre-conference reader and on the present Proceedings. Kent Renegar has to be thanked for his thorough help in the tiniest details of the preparation. Without him, we would not have enjoyed so much the wonderfully organized two days. Chuck Bonwell, the Director of St. Louis College Center for Teaching and Learning has contributed with his unforgettable one day workshop on Active Learning. And, last but not least, let me thank Benő Csapó, head of the Department of Education at Attila József University for having hosted the event in the academic sense of the word as well as for his contribution to the editing of this volume.

Thank you all!