The Olomouc Special Education Days, organized by the Institute of Special Education Studies, are among the traditional spring events held at the Palacký University Faculty of Education. This year’s Days were organized on 19-20 March and they celebrated their tenth birthday magnificently. The first reason for the celebration was the fact that they sponsored three simultaneous events – XXIII. International conference on the issue of people with specific needs, XI. Conference of young scientists and also IX. Drama therapy conference.
The series of conferences, which were attended by almost two hundred active and passive participants, was opened by the director of the Institute of Special Pedagogical Studies Jiří Langer as well as the dean of the Faculty of Education, Vojtech Regec. After the opening, the Tyátr ModroDiv theater performed its performance, followed by expert contributions from invited guests from the ranks of special educators and other professionals from related fields, including architecture and psychotherapy.
The Olomouc Special Pedagogical Days were opened by Kateřina Vitásková, Jan Tomandl, Iva Jungwirthová, Jiří Drahota and Jiří Kantor with Miloslav Klugar, who, with their diverse contributions, introduced students, academics and practitioners to the theme of the conference – Spirals of Knowledge. The organizers then succeeded in spinning this spiral in the following parts of the conference.
The second gift the conference gave itself was the poster section. It took place in a new format consisting of a short presentation of a poster before the entire conference plenary followed by a standard presentation before panels and individual consultations. In addition, all registered participants of the conference had the opportunity to vote in the competition for the best poster. First place in the competition was taken by Karolína Tvarůžková from her home workplace. “This format of the poster section has undoubtedly proven itself, the posters thus attracted many more conference participants, and we will therefore include it at the next conference as well,” said Jiří Langer.
The following hours of the first day of the conference were filled not only with expert contributions presented by domestic and foreign participants, but also with a workshop organized by pedagogues of the department of applied physical activities of FTK UP and a film performance of Tloskov Fiction accompanied by a discussion with the actors.
Simultaneously with XXIII. An international conference on the issue of people with specific needs was the Drama Therapy Conference, which was introduced by Barbora Kováčová with her expert contribution. This was followed by theater workshops and performances by Tyátr ModroDiv from Zlín and Bílá Holubice from Ostrava. The workshops were then led by Patrik Krebs from the Homeless Theater in Bratislava and Ivana Lessner Lištiaková working at the University of Suffolk in Great Britain.
The second day of the conference was dedicated to XI. The conference of young researchers, which was informally opened by the performance of Lotrando and Zubejd by the Dominik Kokora Theater Association, was given a professional introduction by Hana Bundilová from the Department of Physiotherapy of the FTK UP. The following hours of the conference were mostly filled by students of doctoral study programs with their professional contributions from the field of their research.
“Thanks to all the participants, presentations, workshops and discussions, we showed over two days that special pedagogy is not alone in its activities and that the support of people with special needs can really fulfill its mission with the help of a spiral, not only knowledge, but also multidisciplinary teams,” concluded the director of the Institute of Special Pedagogical Studies, Jiří Langer.
