Abstract:

Overcoming the existing isolation between undergraduate teacher training and the everyday educational reality in schools is a challenge for educational systems worldwide, including those of the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic. Also, there are ongoing broad discussions regarding the application of the academic concept vs. the competence concept of undergraduate teacher training in these countries. The key goal of implementing the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in both countries – which is reflected in their national documents – is creating and developing an open system of education, which would flexibly react to the changing environment and provide relevant educational content from a lifelong learning perspective. From the aspect of undergraduate teacher training in the Czech Republic, in the Strategy for the Education Policy of the Czech Republic up to 2030+ (2020), the necessity of its compliance with the existing Concept of Undergraduate Teacher Training (2017) is emphasized. In Slovakia, in the framework of the National Programme for the Development of Education – Quality and Accessible Education for Slovakia (2018), the importance of increasing the attractiveness of the teaching profession, the quality of undergraduate teacher training, as well as providing support to teachers is accentuated. The authors of the study opted for a quantitative research design to find out about pre-service vocational subject teachers’ subjective evaluation of the quality of undergraduate teacher training prior to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic compared with the context influenced by the worldwide pandemic crisis in the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic. The presented research study is focused on the selected component of the background for undergraduate teacher training from the aspect of the availability of study materials, open educational resources, e-books, etc. The findings show that during lockdowns, teacher trainees had limited access to printed study materials but they observed a positive shift in the quality of online resources provided by teachers.

Keywords:

Undergraduate teacher training, Slovak Republic, Czech Republic, study materials, COVID-19.