The classes of Post-Modern Interpretative Categories are optional and constitute a supplementary proposal addressed to students of the Faculty of Polish Studies, especially those specialising in teaching. The lecture, conversation and workshop nature of the classes enables students to gain a deeper understanding of the discussed problems and improve their practical skills, and consequently to translate these skills into building didactic situations. At the same time, this open nature of work with students provides direct insight into their self-development process.
The aim of the classes is, above all, to strengthen the student’s reflective competences in interpretative practices, their erudition and the to support the building of a professional workshop of future teachers. The scope of the issues covered, related to the long-term experience of the Polish Studies scholars in building the interpretative competences of Polish Language and Literature teachers, has been additionally constructed in such a way as to be open to the needs of contemporary users of culture, the necessity of developing their skills and knowledge in the field of inter-media period interpretation.
The objectives of the proposed classes thus boil down to: (a) training the analytical and interpretative skills of the future Polish Language and Literature teacher as a reflective practitioner; (b) correlating literature with other types of art to build erudition; (c) improving the workshop of the Polish Language and Literature teacher in the face of cultural and educational changes to build social competences.
The classes equip students with the tools and keys to the interdisciplinary art of interpretation. They were conceived as additional, optional competences, helpful in the work of Polish Language and Literature teacher, but in fact they have become essential in the face of changes taking place in contemporary humanities. Preparing Polish Language and Literature teachers for the reception of various texts of culture, such as paintings, theatre, film, photography and music in connection with literature, is currently not only necessary, but above all indispensable for building an independent interpreter’s workshop.
Moreover, the extraordinarily rich methodological resources of cultural studies, as well as the perspective on seeing and analysing the basic sources of culture, which is different from that of literary studies, provide here a basis for transforming and supplementing the existing curriculum. By going beyond the narrow field of didactics, literary theory and literary studies, research into the essence of the relationship between texts and images may contribute to freeing future Polish Language and Literature teachers from the visual cognitive and interpretative scheme. Therefore, the variety of perspectives and research tools offered by contemporary humanities, their varying degrees of usefulness and efficiency during Polish Language and Literature teachers’ work with texts and images, requires developing a basic instrumentarium allowing students, especially future Polish Language and Literature teachers, to freely and productively analyse a variety of cultural sources. Such non-literary fields as philosophy, media studies and the anthropology of images, which constitute the theoretical foundation of the classes, become helpful in this respect.
The contemporary interpreter (i.e. the Polish Language and Literature teacher who teaches the art of interpretation) must take into account the fact that in the process of interpretation, not everything depends on his or her knowledge and preparation, but above all on his or her research independence, originality in composing the multi-stage process of understanding and perception of texts of culture, as well as on the choice of materials that shape their perception. He or she must therefore be aware of the process of reading and experiencing the text, as well as of building an individual style of perception. For these reasons, especially today, the role of the Polish Studies scholar (and more broadly: humanities scholar) appears as an extremely responsible journey through the fragile sphere of epistemology, aesthetics and ethics and the sphere of making choices and drifting in a multi-coded reality. Indeed, transformations in the field of contemporary humanities provide a strong basis for reflection on the construction of one’s own philosophy of teaching.