Last week, we waved goodbye to nearly a hundred students from our partner schools in China, who had completed a summer school at the Faculty of Education. As has become tradition, this month-long programme offered them three thematic schools – Fine Arts Education, Creative Therapies in Education, and English Language and Intercultural Communication – each one more appealing than the last, making it by no means easy to choose between them.
However, each school found its own fans and left students feeling very satisfied, with new knowledge, experiences and a strengthening of their intercultural awareness. Indeed, this applied not only to the international participants, but also to us organisers and lecturers, as Dr Ivan Čipkár, one of the summer school coordinators, aptly summarised at the closing ceremony.
Over the past month, it was not just about academic knowledge, but above all about getting to know one another during many informal events that the action-packed programme offered – trips to Prague, Vienna and South Moravia, visits to the zoo, the aqua park, the laser arena, or barbecues in the rose garden and camping with the campfire and sausage roasting.
All in all: we have completed another successful edition of the summer schools, which, despite new and unexpected challenges, went off to everyone’s satisfaction. All that remains is to thank our colleagues from the Institute of Foreign Languages, the Institute of Special Educational Studies and the Department of Art Education for not hesitating to sacrifice part of their holidays to pass on their knowledge and experience to the Chinese students.
A huge thank you also goes to our partners for their helpfulness and patience, including Aquapark Olomouc, Olomouc Zoo, Ololoď, the PROUD Rope Centre, Laser Arena Olomouc and many others. We would like to thank also our student volunteers, known as ‘buddies’, who were primarily responsible for the leisure programme and were on hand to deal with all sorts of unexpected situations, queries and requests. We really appreciate their help; without them, the summer schools would not have been possible.
Thank you all, and once again next year!
