Design thinking - a chance for innovation in higher education institutions

Design thinking as a way of reasoning is becoming more and more popular nowadays. Originated in business and transferred to other areas, it is now being implemented even in education and science. With its four or five steps in the whole process, interdisciplinary teams can solve every problem and find a solution which meets the needs and expectations of the end-users. This approach has also been successfully implemented in higher education institutions and it is through that HEIs are becoming more open and efficient in their cooperation with business, public administration, NGOs and other stakeholders.

Modern Slavistics and the perspectives of studying Russian-Polish problems

The internal differentiation of Slavic studies (history, linguistics, literary criticism, cultural studies) loses the perspective of system integrity. The development of the humanities led to the emergence of trends aimed at a complex comprehension of Slavdom in the light of the general patterns of European civilization and the characteristics of their local refraction. In the development of such a set of problems, thinking in the categories of holism, methods of interdisciplinarity and comparative studies are especially promising.

In future, changes in science and society will increasingly demand interdisciplinarily prepared professionals and researchers. Inter/transdisciplinarity has been worked on theoretically and scientifically examined. This review study shows how both approaches are explained, how they are put into practice in doctoral studies, the results of the interdisciplinary approaches applied, but also their limitations and barriers.

The article deals with the actual issues of forming professionally-oriented foreign language competence concerning the future engineers’ training. The article testifies the necessity of rendering future engineers with professionally-oriented foreign language training based on new engineering and technological approaches. The challenges of interdisciplinary studies of any area of economy cause enhanced intensive international collaboration and intercultural cooperation. It implies the improvement of professionally-oriented foreign language competence demand for the next generation of engineers and middle-line staffsince it is essential for interdisciplinary and international team work training. Considering the experimental results, it has been confirmed that professional foreign language competence is effectively developed within “Intensive integrative course of foreign language”, content and structure of which are based on an integrative approach and a set of suggested organisational principles. The article summarises the results of the direct observation and interviews.

Mission statement is an element of the strategic management, the basis for the strategic development of university. Mission statement provides orientation and increases the motivation of the members of university. The results of the research prove that the mission statement of universities must be developed in an open discussion with the participation of the members of university. The most popular commitments of the mission statement are equal rights and opportunities for men and women, internationality, unity of research and teaching, quality assurance, interdisciplinarity. Analysis of the content of mission statements which were formulated during the last years shows that they propose a partnership relationship between the administration of university and its members.

The Concept of Interdisciplinarity in Social Work. The Integrative Role of Pedagogy in Building of the Theory of Social Work

The aim of the article is to show the presence of the concepts of interdisciplinarity, multidisciplinarity and heterogeneity in scientific texts in the field of social work, to compare the methodological status of social pedagogy and social work as areas of scientific knowledge also created thanks to interdisciplinary research, and to propose the postulate of the superiority of the pedagogical epistemological and methodological perspective in building theoretical foundations. social work. It was pointed out that social pedagogy, both in the historical, institutional and subject and content aspects, is closely related to the basics of social work. Taking into account the scope of issues analyzed by social work and its methodological and historical conditions, a structured way of understanding the concept of interdisciplinarity of social work and locating it in the area of social pedagogy was proposed, calling the process of this location subdisciplinarization of social work. The problems discussed in the article are of a meta-theoretical and meta-methodological nature, and the main source of the research are texts on the basics of pedagogy and social work.