The report concerns the principal assumptions and the first phase of the project entitled Supporting integration of foreigners in the Silesian Voivodeship, implemented thanks to co-financing obtained from the Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund. The text describes the activities undertaken by the main partners of the project, i.e. the Silesian Voivodeship Office and the School of Polish Language and Culture of the University of Silesia in Katowice. The report includes detailed information on linguis- tic and cultural education of adults and children, including a summing up of the most important content taught during Polish language classes, allowing the project partici- pants to function more easily within the Polish environment.

The paper addresses the issue of refugees in the broad sense of the term, i.e. people forced to leave their homes and seek conditions for a normal life due to climate change and to the excessive environment footprint left by humans. The numerous reasons for this type of displacement include drought, the growing scarcity of natural resources in seas and oceans, and the unfair distribution of water. These three climate plagues are analysed on the basis of non-fiction literature – Wykluczeni [The Excluded], which is a book of reportage by Artur Domosławski, Ben Rawlence’s City of Thorns. Nine Lives in the World’s Largest Refugee Camp, and Stefano Liberti’s South of Lampedusa. In the public consciousness, migrations motivated by climate change and human interference in the ecosystem have been functioning since recently, but they will actually become the greatest challenge of our day and age. This is why the important role played by humanities is to speak about them, to comment on their performative power, to debate on potential solutions, and to trigger warning discourses leading to the development of a habit of imagining “scenarios for the future”. Acts of imagination provide the possibility to shape the world in an unlimited way and to play out in a virtual manner some key social, cultural and political situations, in order to live well on an overcrowded planet, where water, land and food may be lacking a few decades from now.

The author of the paper shows how one may reflect on the essence of human rights, through the lens of reporters’ stories, including in particular Ben Rawlence’s book City of Thorns: Nine Lives in the World’s Largest Refugee Camp. The paper encourages one to listen to the voice of refugees and to develop an interest in their lives in order to understand how they define their rights, what they derive them from, and how they judge their observance by the international community. In fact, these deliberations are connected with a problem which is important for contemporary education, namely how to shape a genuinely humanistic attitude among young Poles towards people from different cultures, who are additionally forced to leave their homes.

The paper presents Hanna Mortkowicz’s account of her trip to Palestine entitled W Palestynie. Obrazy i zagadnienia [In Palestine. Images and Issues] (1936) as a text read after many years, which can be inscribed, in dialogue with contemporary reportage (e.g. by Paweł Smoleński), in the intercultural dialogue currently in progress. The study shows how Mortkowicz opens the reader to the problem of migration. The writer does this by focusing her accounts on a group of Jews fleeing from Nazism – eternal wanderers, coming to Palestine in search of a new homeland. Text analysis shows how, thanks to Mortkowicz’s use of numerous narrative strategies and description techniques, such as: focalisation, personal narrative, and accumulation of space or time, she introduced her readers to the experience of newly-arrived refugees, people who are on the border between social existence and non-existence. In fact, a study of the text makes it possible to find that this forgotten title can provide reading matter to be used in the context of contemporary intercultural education.

The aim of the paper is to critically analyse the documentary series Wracajcie, skąd przyszliście [Go Back to Where You Came From], broadcast by the commercial television station TVN in December 2018. The people participating in the programme were supposed to represent/embody the polarised opinions of the Polish society on (accepting) refugees, so they were according to the “three for/three against” model. The group, together with Piotr Kraśko who conducted the programme, visited refugee camps and centres in Germany, Austria, Serbia, Greece and Iraq to confront their opinions with the people they met there. The declared aim of the programme, in fact, was to find an answer to the main question: should Poland accept refugees or, as the title says, should they go back to where they came from?

This article looks into the representation of Polish immigrants in contemporary Dutch film, with a particular focus on the prominent role of domestic settings and familial dysfunctions in the pictures involved. As the analysis reveals, many of the films under discussion bring into view troubled Dutch protagonists (especially men) who suffer from degradation in the familial and social sphere. The Polish characters in turn tend to be instrumentalized as (potential) agents of change (or rather “restoration”), taking up traditional familial and domestic roles that are no longer fulfilled by Dutch characters.

The paper is an attempt to present the ways of functioning of the migration issue in the latest Polish literature for children and young people, which uses a certain universal topos, namely the home and narratives related to hospitality, when presenting the phenomenon studied. Such a problematised view of the issue is inscribed in the reflection on intercultural education, under the patronage of the philosophy of love and compassion represented by Martha Nussbaum. The assumptions of the humanistic philosophy of love will be confronted with the (pre-)school and school practice preparing children to meet the Other.

The article presents aspects related to the perception of the Polish culture by foreign students of the University of Warsaw. Comments by representatives of these nations, with whom we share a common history and a Slavic ethnic characteristic, became the basis for deliberations. Aspects are also addressed here related to migration to Poland, its causes and characteristics. The analysis covered cultural knowledge about Poland, ways of perceiving the shared history and mental differences mentioned by foreign students coming from the eastern territories of the First Republic of Poland.

The paper presents a fragment of the author’s research into interferences in intercultural communication with the participation of foreign students learning Polish. The research made it possible to record various stressful situations and stressogenic factors, including “face-threatening” ones, namely those involving the risk of losing one’s face, to which the foreign interlocutor, or sometimes also the other participant of the communication act, were exposed. The aim of the research is to detect mechanisms causing the image of the interlocutor or interlocutors to be upset (undermined). It also identifies and discusses didactic and non-didactic situations causing negative emotional perceptions and mental states at least in one of the communicating parties. The paper uses the concepts of “face” by E. Goffman, P. Brown and Levinson, as well as conceptual apparatus and research methodology of American communication ethnographers.

The paper addresses aspects of the language of the Polish diaspora and of the standard language, as forms of language spoken by Poles living abroad. The standard language is/should be common for all Poles – used everywhere and by everyone in the same way. The Polish diaspora language, on the other hand, appears only in specific territories and is used for communication in specific groups of Poles. It differs depending on the country where they settled and on the language it comes into contact with, as well as on the diversity of the emigrants, and also depending on the Polish they brought from their home country (either them themselves or their parents). Although the terms “Polonia” [Polish diaspora] and “język polonijny” [Polish diaspora language] are commonly used, one should be aware that the latter are actually numerous.

Migration and emigration processes have always had and continue to have a significant impact on the socioeconomic and political situation of the whole world. The Zaporizhia Oblast will serve as an example of a multicultural area of Ukraine, as an attractive area for many newcomers since the 15th century. The multicultural borderlands of south-eastern Ukraine discussed in the paper are to demonstrate the influence of migration processes on the formation of individual identity, including in particular Polish identity. Nowadays, many inhabitants of the studied area are unable to clearly define their cultural identity.

The paper presents selected aspects of the cultural influence of Czech emigration on the intellectual life of the Republic of Poland in the second half of the 16th century and in the early 17th century. The first part discusses the history of the Rybiński family and their literary achievements. The second part is dedicated to Jan Łasicki and to his version of the history of the Czech Brethren. Thus, the author of the paper attempts to show – using the examples of phenomena connected with the first and second wave of Czech emigration – how the presence of Czech emigrants influenced the Polish genological system of those times.

Designing classes with the contribution of students who experienced migration and those without similar experiences becomes a didactic, pedagogical and cultural challenge. The aim of this paper is to analyse such phenomena in culture, which may provide inspiration for teachers as to how to think about teaching Polish culture in primary and secondary schools. The field for investigation is defined by the categories of transmediality and transculturality, since in the author’s opinion the constant experiencing of transmediality and transmedia storytelling in culture results in transcultural experiences. The author’s deliberations are based on examples from experimental poetry, forum theatre and ambient literature.

The paper addresses the aspect of lingua-culture and its role in teaching Polish among students with migration experiences at a Polish school. Polish as the language of school education serves as a tool used in the process of learning about the world, but it is also a guarantee of efficient social integration. Moving smoothly within the lingua-cultural sphere (deciphering cultural codes hidden in the language) in the case of users of the language who come from a different linguistic and cultural background enables free communication as well as a sense of connection with the host environment. The author supports this proposition with theoretical interpretations (Edward Sapir’s and Claire Kramsch’s views) as well as with practical experience of a foreign language teacher, using the example of selected literary texts (the work of Grzegorz Kasdepke).

Film is one of the media which, due to their accessibility and popularity, can be easily used in today’s world as a tool supporting integration and the process of integration into a foreign culture, which is often very distant (geographically and mentally). The paper is based on the assumption that a foreign culture cannot be learned, but that one can get to know it and to learn as much as possible “about it”. The aim of the text is to indicate which criteria should be taken into account when selecting films intended for immigrants and refugees, and how these films may support the process of adaptation to the Polish culture.

Dictionaries have had a very important didactic function ever since they first appeared, and they have always been an indispensable help to learners of all languages. In this text, the author reflects whether the general, monolingual Polish Academy of Sciences Great Dictionary of Polish, which has been available on the Internet for several years now, might be a useful tool for developing linguistic competence of Polish language learners; in other words, whether this dictionary can be used as a learner’s one. The paper starts with a brief description of the monolingual learner’s dictionary as a specific lexicographic genre and then presents the thorough analyses of the Great Dictionary of Polish macro- and microstructure with the eye on the usefulness of solutions for language learners.

The educational system in a given country largely influences the process of shaping of the students’ identity. The text is a study on an excerpt from material which is part of research reconstructing the linguistic and cultural image of Poles and of Slovenians. An analysis of the operational categories of the linguistic image of the world is a valuable source of knowledge about the stereotypical image of the country and of its representatives, reflecting the subjective point of view of respondents. A binary model emerges clearly, with a positive – negative (unambitious) attitude of Slovenians towards science and education. The comparison of the auto- and heterostereotypical approach, in our case the Slovenian one with the Polish one (respondents who had had contact with Slovenians), yields a broader picture of the studied aspect.