The key aspects of the institutional development of pedagogy as an academic discipline in Slovenia

Tadej Vidmar and Edvard Protner

Summary:  The article draws the development line showing how pedagogy was positioned within university studies. The starting point is set in the period when the state school system was founded and when the need for a unified school doctrine emerged. The article then follows the positioning of pedagogical content in philosophical and theological studies until the disintegration of Austria-Hungary. It also analyses the relationships between university or academic pedagogy, pedagogy in teacher training and the pedagogic textbooks used during the period. At the academic level pedagogy in Slovenia acquired an entirely new dimension with the establishment of the University of Ljubljana and the Chair of Pedagogy at the Faculty of Arts in 1919. The authors outline the main characteristics of pedagogic studies in the period between the two world wars and indicate the theoretical orientations of the period. Pedagogy as a university study programme saw new growth after World War II, when the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, appointed additional academic staff. This enabled greater disciplinary diversity, which gradually led to the foundation of andragogy as an independent field of study, later followed by social pedagogy as well. The article also analyses the pedagogy study programmes at the Universities of Maribor and Primorska, and it draws attention to the trend of adapting to the Anglo-American tradition of “educational sciences”.