Convergence of Environmental Education in Technical Natural Sciences with Cross-Border CZ-PL Practice

Abstract The subject of this communication is the evaluation of the results of pedagogical research focused on environmental-technical university education within the framework of a four-year PL-CZ project supported by the EU, entitled “Cooperation between the University of Opole and the University of Hradec Kralove increasing the employability of graduates on the cross-border labour market” and its three-year sustainability, which we have already reported on in a previous communication in this Journal. The aim was to increase the mutual cross-border substitutability of graduates of environmental-technical fields of study of the Faculty of Science and Technology of the University of Opole (PL) and the Faculty of Science of the University of Hradec Kralove (CZ), when looking for employment in Czech and Polish companies. There is an increasing number of graduates of environmental-technical fields of study who do not work in their fields of study, despite the fact that these workers are missing from the labour market in both countries. The convergence of study programs took place in the form of mutual cross-border teaching with the creation of Czech-Polish teaching materials focused on professional terminology and through exchange four-day field trips and fortnightly and monthly curricular internships. A team of internship tutors in companies, future potential employers of students, was created, a questionnaire for evaluating student performance in soft and hard skills was optimised and verified as part of a pilot study. Both groups of PL and CZ students achieved quite comparable results. There are also no significant differences in the evaluation of individual students in soft and hard skills. However, the number of respondents (students) was limited by the financial resources of the PL-CZ project, which were reduced during the COVID pandemic. Only selected students with a strong interest in the field of study and gaining practical experience participated in the study. Therefore, the conclusions of the pilot study need to be verified on a larger sample of respondents.