My name is Bartosz Rydlinski; I am an assistant professor at Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski University in Warsaw (UKSW) at the Institute of Political Science and Administration. Since 2015, I have been employed as a researcher and academic teacher at this University. I teach classes on European social history, economic thought, and systemic transformation in Central and Eastern Europe. Among other things, I gained teaching experience by giving guest lectures in the United States, Germany, Malta, Romania, Slovenia, Italy, the Czech Republic, and Ukraine.
In 2013, I defended my doctoral dissertation in political science at UKSW titled „Naomi Klein’s Political Thought in the Context of Neoliberal Capitalism” (supervisor: prof. dr. hab. Aniela Dylus). Twice, I was a visiting researcher at Georgetown University in Washington, DC (February-July 2014, April-May 2022). In the 2016/2017 academic year, I was employed as a visiting international scholar at the Institute of Public Policy at Silesian University in Opava, Czech Republic.
In my research, I deal with the political crisis of the center-left in Europe and the United States. I pay particular attention to the analysis of Polish post-communist social democracy, which was both a hegemonic force after 1989 and, since 2005, has been, at best, a second-league grouping. Another field of interest is authoritarian populism, which, in my opinion, is a response to several neoliberal changes taking place both in the center and on the periphery of globalization. My research interests also relate to think tanks, which have been losing their role and meaning in political agenda-setting over the past few years.
I joined the Polish Teachers’ Union (ZNP, Związek Nauczycielstwa Polskiego) in 2019, driven by a desire to counteract the negative changes taking place in science and higher education. Four consecutive governments since 2007 have implemented neoliberal policies that have had negative consequences. Employment in universities has significantly been junked; research funding has been transferred to external grant agencies, and there has been a fetishization of publishing in English in Western and expensive publishing houses. As a mid-career university teacher, I concluded that conducting my pro-worker activities within unions was more effective.
Before becoming an active trade union member, I socialized in this environment. Since 2008, I have been active in progressive think tanks, such as the „Amicus Europae” Foundation, founded by Aleksander Kwasniewski, president of Poland from 1995 to 2005, who came from Polish social democracy. In 2011, I co-founded the leading left-wing think tank, the Ignacy Daszynski Center, which is still active today and working closely with Poland’s largest trade union confederation, the All-Poland Alliance of Trade Unions (OPZZ, Ogólnopolskie Porozumienie Związków Zawodowych). I have worked with several European social democratic political foundations.
As part of my work in social democratic think tanks, I participated in many political education trainings. I taught members of left-wing political parties, progressive NGO’s, trade unions, women’s organizations, and LGBTQ+ communities. My teaching and coaching experience was recognized by ZNP, which invited me to participate in several trainings, especially international ones, given my English language skills and high intercultural social competencies.
The subject of Polish-German-Jewish reconciliation occupies a special place in my activity as a trainer. ZNP is very committed to building understanding and understanding among teachers from these countries who are involved in teaching about the Holocaust in their work. This unprecedented genocide, in the opinion of ZNP and my own, deserves constant analysis and attention. It is a form of ensuring that this crime is never repeated because, as Marian Turski, a former prisoner of a German Nazi death and extermination camp, noted, „Auschwitz did not fall from the sky”.
My trade union recommended my participation in the European Training of Trainers Network organized by the European Trade Union Institute (ETUI) so that I could acquire additional skills and knowledge that will help train ZNP members with the best and newest methods and a pan-European perspective. European trade unions are a rare example of an ideological community that is the backbone of a united Europe.
An important aspect of my coaching activity is understanding the challenge of educating professional members in the context of my academic career. Conducting union training is fundamentally different from a class taught at a university to students. In a sense, the trainer acts in a supportive role for the union trainees, who take part in it because they want to learn new skills and gain knowledge that will be incidental to their union activities. In this respect, teaching students differs significantly because their class participation is mandatory for obtaining a university education. The age and education of the scholars are also noticeable differences. To enter university, students must graduate from high school, and the vast majority of them are around 20 years old. Union trainees do not have a standardized level of education; they are of different ages, and many times, they are older than me. All this requires me to use various training methods and union training strategies.
Arriving for the first ETT1 training in Florence in May 2023, I had a general knowledge of the Eurotrainer pathway. However, I just learned that the entire process culminates in a certificate from the University of Lille. As an academic who is professionally involved in accrediting students’ knowledge, I naturally recognized the value of the mentioned university diploma, confirming the professional training process of a trade union trainer. Therefore, at the very first training, I was determined to go through the entire ETUI training process, which is necessary to apply to the University of Lille.
The ETT1 (May 9-13, 2023, in Florence), ePortfolio building (September 26-28, 2023, in Valetta), and ETT2 (December 5-9, 2023, in Sofia) training constituted an intensive time during which I learned not only the philosophy of ETUI’s operation, the new training method, but above all I improved the skills of self-evaluation of my own training, self-analysis of the programs and methods used, the work of the trainees. As mentioned in earlier courses, the ability to self-reflect and self-learn as a trainer is the highest value of the entire training series.
My ePortfolio included the following trainings:
1) The national dimension was devoted to dealing with radical populism among the Central Young Teacher’s Club members of the ZNP. The topic is extremely timely, as in Poland, Central Europe, and the European Union itself, we have witnessed the political, electoral, and symbolic successes of illiberal populism for many years. This affects society as a whole, including students, their parents, and the teachers themselves. The goal of the training was to learn teachers’ skills in responding to radical content emerging during school activities,
2) On transnational and multicultural dimensions, I chose to train Polish, German, and Israeli teachers on their methods and forms of teaching about the Holocaust. The primary purpose of the training was to exchange both best practices with teaching young Poles, Germans, and Israelis about this unimaginable crime against humanity. An additional, in a sense hidden dimension of the training, was to learn empathy between the asymmetrical sides of the darkest history of the World War II period,
3) Pedagogical innovation concerns remote forms of learning about the profile of trainees, an online form of conducting training evaluation, and successive measurement of learning outcomes. My innovation involves conducting pre- and post-training surveys, meeting remotely and briefly at mini-training sessions on MS Teams, and successively sending short follow-up materials (reports, short articles, podcasts, YouTube materials.) In the conditions of Polish trade unions, this form of contact with training members is pioneering.