A group of students from the Department of Pedagogy, with two majors – General Pedagogy and Special Pedagogy, visited the Academy of Psychotherapy on 9. 4. 2025.
The visit was organized as part of the Adult Education class with several goals: experiential learning about the possibilities offered by field teaching, experiencing the quality of work in the field of adult education for professional life provided by the Academy of Psychotherapy, deeper understanding of the process of curriculum development in adult education, and connecting theoretical concepts from andragogy and andragogy praxeology with a special focus on psychotherapy education, which is the main activity of the Academy.
In contact with the director and founder of the Academy, Dr. sc. With Mirela Badurina, who shared her decades of personal lifelong learning and self-education with the attendees, the students had the opportunity to understand in a deeper way the meaning of the difference between the concepts of a learning society and a knowledge society, the concept of horizontal and vertical educational mobility in preparation for professional life, the purposefulness of continuous work on the quality of psychotherapist education programs (a step from an occupation to a profession) through the development of a credit transfer assessment system, and the necessity of the equivalence process in education, which is directly related to the concepts of employability and flexicurity in the modern world of work.
The students had the opportunity to strengthen their personal capacities for a phenomenological approach to understanding the educational climate and its importance for working with adults (comparison of the working climate in the spaces of the Academy and the spaces of a traditional classroom), and to move from the pedagogical expectation that the working climate is defined by the teacher, to the andragogical understanding that this climate is co-created in the interaction between teacher and students.
The visit brought together 35 participants and was organized with full respect for the principles of working with adults (voluntariness, economy, gradualism, individualization, efficiency, etc.), and in the words of Professor Mavrak as the head of the study group – there is a justified assumption that this visit is a turning point in the rapprochement of group members, rapprochement in the interaction between professors and groups, as well as rapprochement in the sphere of multi-sector cooperation, which is particularly emphasized in the adult education legislation. In the words of the participants, with this kind of double affirmation – both psychotherapeutic and andragogical activities – the students expand their personal educational perspectives and notice the necessary connection between theory and practice in working with people.
The Academy of Psychotherapy hereby once again happily confirms its openness to further promoting the idea concept of a learning society, in anticipation of new inspiring encounters in its premises.
