2023: Special issue No1
FORWORD
The staff of the Department of Pedagogy consider it very important to organise a regular scientific conference every six months, which provides a framework for the meeting of experts in the field of public education and academics, and for the exchange of opinions and experiences.
The conference "Heritage and Communities" took place on 13 October 2022 in the Markó Street Lobby of the Budapest University of Economics and Business Administration. It is of particular interest that after the opening of the conference, Dr. Andrea Lugasi PhD Habil, Dean of the Faculty of Business and Economics of the Budapest University of Economics and Business Administration and Dr. Erika Juhász PhD, Director of Professional Development of the National Institute of Cultural Affairs signed a cooperation agreement between the two institutions. Both parties expressed their hope that the formalisation of the agreement will further strengthen the already extensive cooperation.
After the plenary sessions, the presentations continued in two sessions, one of which focused on the tourism aspects of culture, and the other - in which the staff of the Department of Pedagogy presented their research - mainly on the public culture and community building aspects. The main objective of the conference and of the Pedagogy section was interdisciplinarity, i.e., to show the close links and impacts between community organisation, culture and public education and tourism.
Most of the presentations in the Pedagogy section also elaborated on the research material of the National Institute of Cultural Heritage's call for proposals, presenting the unexplored parts of the project.
The study analysing Palladio's work differs somewhat from this theme, but it also includes an important element of value research and analysis, illustrating the mechanism of the impact of cultural values across the ages.
In 2020, the Department of Pedagogy won the National Institute of Cultural Heritage's call for proposals for research groups entitled "The role of local treasure libraries and cultural heritage in public education and community building in the sub-regions of Vác and Dunakeszi".
During the research, we were primarily interested in how municipal libraries function at the local level. What other emotions do people have about national and local values. New, previously unclassified values that could be added to the municipal directories could be identified through a population survey.
The timeliness element of the study was given by the fact that because of extensive social and professional consultations, Act XXX of 2012 on Hungarian National Values and Hungaricums was passed, which gave a new impetus to the development of value libraries.
The research topic was also examined from the sociological, psychological, educational, and cultural science perspectives, building on a systematic presentation of the available domestic legislation and a more comprehensive international background analysis in addition to the domestic literature.
The complete research material was also used to produce a volume of studies entitled "In Search of Local Values", which was evaluated and praised by Dr. László Ponyi, the central research manager of the National Institute of Cultural Heritage.
We sincerely hope that this publication will be useful for the professional and interested audience and will give inspiration and ideas to our research colleagues for further public cultural research activities.
