Abstract:

The pre-service science teachers’ education in the Czech Republic has a long tradition. The pre-service teachers’ education for lower and upper secondary education is done in faculties focused on either science or education; future teachers usually choose two science disciplines. Until the turn of the millennium, this was done in the form of continuous five-year study programmes. Today, all such faculties run the preparation of science teachers in concordance with the Bologna Declaration, in structured study programmes – three-year bachelor programme and two-year master programme. The approach to the programme and its concept has slight differences depending on whether a faculty is focused on science or on education; this reflects mainly in a different emphasis on the individual parts of the teaching profession – faculties of education put greater emphasis on the pedagogical and psychological disciplines while faculties of science put emphasis on the study of the disciplines themselves. In both cases, the unifying element is the subject didactics. Both have a problem in common: because of the structured studying, there is a split between science preparation, which is done mostly in the bachelor programmes, and teachers’ professional preparation, which is mostly realized in the master programmes.

This contribution is concerned with these consequences of the Bologna Declaration for the pre-service science teachers’ study. It shows the results of an extensive questionnaire survey that was realized throughout the Czech Republic in 2013-2015. The questionnaire survey shows, among other things, that the bachelor study programmes focus mostly on the science part of education while the master programmes focus on pedagogically-psychological and subject didactics preparation. The difficulty of the bachelor programmes is that all the subjects of both chosen disciplines are now only taught in three years while the two years of the master programme are dedicated mostly to the didactical disciplines, often without much relation to the disciplines the students actually study. While the first degree of the programme basically creates a science expert, the second degree only puts emphasis on the pedagogical part of the teaching profession. This leads to paradoxical situations where students which did not go through both degrees of education-focused study, are either scientists with no pedagogical qualifications, or educators without the necessary knowledge of their science subject. Here, therefore, it is necessary to seek solutions of how to realize the pre-service teachers’ education, even as a part of structured education, in order to ensure continual preparation for their future profession.

Keywords:

Pre-service science teachers´ education, science and pedagogical faculties, bachelor study programmes, master study programmes, questionnaire surveys.