From Transmission to Constructivism in Initial Teacher Education Conceptual Study of Competence Frameworks through Dialogic and Embodied Lenses

Abstract

This paper examines how Czech reforms in initial teacher education (2020–2025) reframe the teacher’s role from a transmitter of knowledge to a relational and reflective professional. This agenda gains urgency as schooling is increasingly tasked with navigating contested values and civic life. The study combines a purposive analysis of key policy and curriculum documents with a dialogic and embodied lens informed by Buber’s I–Thou/I–It distinction and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment. The analysis shows how competence frameworks and related reform texts promote constructivist orientations that foreground learner agency, teacher self-reflection, dialogic interaction, and professional identity formation, alongside cooperative and project-based learning and formative, criterion-referenced assessment. At the same time, persistent implementation frictions are identified, including fragmented early-career learning, mismatched expectations between graduates and employers, uneven treatment of media and civic education, and challenges in assessing relational and embodied competences without resorting to reductive checklists. The paper concludes by outlining implications for aligning programme outcomes, learning environments, practicum, and induction with dialogic and embodied competences in civic/social science teacher preparation.