TEACHING TYPOGRAPHY AS A PART OF THE CULTURAL HERITAGE – EXPERIENCES IN TEACHER TRAINING

Globalization has a number of fruitful effects: it can ameliorate equal opportunity in many fields, improve communication and decrease distances among people. However, it has some negative impact on the cultural heritage of regions. Typography is a part of our cultural heritage that we should save and have to preserve its diversity.
Typography is more than a part of the past – it is an everlasting tool that offers us many useful means to achieve our goals. Typographical rules provide us a set of accessories that can contribute to the expression of the essence of a message as well as the focuses of a curriculum, and can help to catch the reader’s eye on a web page. These tools can be necessary for educated people in their work. In consequence, we should embed some useful parts of this field into the curricula in higher education – especially in teacher training because of the growing importance and number of e-contents. These curricula are developed and created by the teachers themselves without any help of professional typographers.
Nowadays we live in a globalized world, we can use the same wordprocessors and desktop publishers with the same basic settings – such as fonts, line spacing, margins, etc. As a side effect of the possibilities, the documents get lose their special tastes influenced by the traditions of the regions. It can cause problems if the people do not know the meaning of some tools. For example, a layout of an emphasized paragraph bears another meaning for the writer than the reader that might bring on misunderstanding or result lost information.
In general, typographical recommendations are not in the curricula of teacher trainings in our country. The aim of this paper is to present a method for how to introduce the highlights of our typographical heritage into the curricula of teachers’ trainings. And we examine some of the experiences of the twenty-year teaching in training of science teachers.