| European Educational | ISSN 1474-9041 | ||
| Volume 4 Number 1 2005 | |||
Other issues available | Journal home page | Publisher home page | |||
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| Introduction. Travelling Policy in Post-Socialist Education |
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| This special issue provides a window on processes of education reform in post-socialist contexts. While there is a huge body of research on reform movements in Anglo-Saxon and European countries, there is less literature on education reform in the countries that were previously embraced by the USSR. The countries that previously made up the Soviet world are diverse. Prior to its disintegration in the early 1990s, the USSR reached from the Baltic to the Bering Sea and the Sea of Japan, from the borders of Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, to the Arctic. The USSR encompassed substantial parts of Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans and Caucasus, and the five countries of Central Asia. Almost 150 million people lived within this immense geographic and culturally diverse space, excluding Russia. Since the early 1990s, the countries making up the Soviet Union have become independent states with responsibility for the design and development of their own education systems. Each country faces complex social and economic changes that have accompanied independence, and new challenges in terms of governance and policy making. As in other parts of the world, education has been seen as a significant lever in responding to the demands of the new national context and also to the pressures of globalisation. These developments have prompted a series of education reform initiatives across the post-socialist contexts. The initial idea for a special issue of EERJ on post-socialist education reform came from conversations between a group of people working together on national education reform in Kazakhstan. This initiative, orchestrated and funded by the Soros Foundation, represented the very first stages in an education reform process. It focused on the development of an internal office to support education reform within Kazakhstan and initial interventions into the policy discussions in the country. These interventions entailed a series of workshops at which education experts from around the world talked and worked with senior Kazakh educators. The Ministry of Education was not a sponsor of these workshops but had been informed of them and had sent representatives to participate in each workshop. The aim of the initial one-year program of workshops, and the subsequent three-year strategy, was to build commitment to a reform agenda in Kazakhstan and gain Ministry of Education endorsement. At this stage, it was envisaged that Kazakhstan would seek further funding to support the reform imitative through one of the big banks, the World Bank or Asian Development Bank. The participants in this Kazakhstan reform initiative had all had prior experience of education reform in other places. These experiences gave each of them a distinctive perspective on the processes of national education reform in post-socialist contexts. Their current roles also provided distinct vantage points on the way reform agenda became embedded in national contexts. The special issue of EERJ provided an opportunity to draw on this expertise and to make it more publicly available. We have also drawn on other researchers who have relevant post-socialist education reform experience to extend the picture of education reform. Framing the Special Issue The starting point for this special issue lies in the Kazakhstan education reform initiative. Here is a country, 10 years on from independence, that is confronting significant social and economic changes. It is located in a part of the world that, particularly since 11 September 2001, has been of considerable geopolitical significance. Yet it is a country with a long history of Russian colonisation (200 years) and more recent Sovietisation that has disconnected it from wider debates about education occurring in other parts of the world. The workshops sponsored by the Soros Foundation and the establishment of the Soros–Kazakhstan national office provide a range of inputs into the prevailing discussion of Kazakh education. These discussions already included debates about education reform prior to independence from the Soviet Union. There were groups of educators, especially in the universities and in non-governmental organisations, who were already working to advance curriculum and assessment reform, the treatment of special-needs children and the reform of school textbooks. The new knowledge inputs from experts outside Kazakhstan both complemented and challenged these existing indigenous reform agenda. The participation of the Ministry of Education in the workshops, as well as many other senior educators, ensured that the novel ideas and proposals were heard at the heart of the existing education system. It was an initial step in the process of winning the support of Kazakhstan educators for reform, and gaining official endorsement for reform in a country that retains a highly centralised governance structure. This process of external ideas being inserted into an existing education context with its own traditions and values has been described as a relationship between travelling policy and local spaces (Jones & Alexiadou, 2001). In a recent paper that draws on European and Anglo-Saxon experience, Ken Jones & Nafsika Alexiadou argue that today, the globalisation of education policy making has encouraged the formation of a distinctive education policy discourse that travels globally across national boundaries. These travelling policies encounter local spaces, such as Kazakhstan education, a particular city or even a specific school, where they come up against local education traditions and values. The interaction between the travelling policy and local spaces leads to a negotiation and indigenisation (Silova, this issue) of the travelling policy and also a growing acceptance or embedding of these policy discourses within the local context and ways of working. They summarise this process as follows: 1. At an international level – through the work of intergovernmental organisations and lobbying groups organised on a pan-European (or transnational) level – a coherent set of policy themes have emerged that national policy makers within nation-states have sought to translate into projects for the reshaping of national schooling systems. 2. These policy agendas interact in specific ways with the traditions, ideologies, forms of organisation and forms of social movement that have developed on the national terrain – though these national traditions have themselves been influenced by wider international contexts and influences (such as the influence of longstanding Russian colonisation of Kazakhstan and a long prior history of migration and cultural exchange in this world of the Silk Road). This relationship between travelling policy and local spaces encourages a policy convergence across nations facilitated by greater global interconnectedness and the workings of a nascent global policy community but it is mediated, translated and recontextualised within national and local education structures. 3. The outcomes of the relationship between 1 and 2 indicate both the developing ‘embeddedness’ of travelling policy within national policy elites and, to differing extents, a degree of local ‘policy inflectedness’. This policy inflectedness arises and is shaped in the processes by which (a) various social forces – local policy communities, trade unions, social movements – have forced an adaptation of global agendas, or (b) local policy elites have managed to combine particular aspects of travelling policy with what are perceived to be agendas arising from problems of a particular national character. In mapping this process of interaction between travelling policy and local policy and practice, Jones and Alexiadou highlight the way particular agenda generated by organisations such as the World Bank, World Trade Organization and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development provide a reference point for national policy development in many different countries and also as a legitimation for national-level changes whose implementation may be controversial. However, they also affirm that these global policy discourses are not simply implemented in target nations. Rather, local communities at national, regional or local level interact with and negotiate these travelling policies and, in some cases, contest and resist them. They also indicate that this travelling policy has certain features because of the common concern with reshaping education and education systems, and conceptualisations of educational purposes, in ways that correspond to current shifts in the wider global economy. These features are:
Travelling Policy in Post-socialist Contexts Jones & Alexiadou’s (2001) conceptualisation of the relationship between travelling policy and local spaces provides a helpful framework for reflecting on the Kazakhstan reform project. It provides a structure and a set of concepts for talking about the process and experience of initiating education reform in Kazakhstan and in other post-socialist contexts. It also provides a framework for posing questions:
These concepts of travelling policy/local spaces, and the questions they prompt, provide a framework for reflecting on national education reform processes in post-socialist contexts, on national differences in post-socialist contexts and on the way the Soviet legacy shapes the processes and character of education reform. References Jones, K. & Alexiadou, N. (2001) The Global and the National: reflections on the experience of three European states, paper presented at the European Conference on Educational Research, Lille. TERRI SEDDON |
| Of Credits, Kontrakty and Critical Thinking: encountering ‘market reforms’ in Kyrgyzstani higher education |
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| This article explores the impact of market metaphors and mechanisms on higher education in Kyrgyzstan. Drawing upon recent anthropological literature on the local meanings of market reforms in post-socialist contexts, as well as work in the field of educational policy that has focused attention on the ‘local spaces’ in which curricular and administrative reforms are encountered, this study will explore the ways in which languages of market have been received and appropriated by the students, teachers and administrators who have to negotiate what Kyrgyzstani higher education reform means in practice. Specifically, the article examines how practices and valuations of higher education have been affected by the opening of commercial (kontraktnyie) departments in nominally state universities, by the transformation of curricular content and teaching practice in the social sciences, and by the severing of the Soviet-era link between higher education and guaranteed professional employment. Drawing upon interviews and participant observation, it will suggest that we need to move beyond the overdrawn dichotomies in which contestations over the post-Soviet educational space are generally cast (‘East’ vs. ‘West’; ‘Tradition’ vs. ‘Innovation’) to focus on the complex ways in which educational ‘reform’ is practised and interpreted in specific institutional settings. |
| Non-traveling ‘Best Practices’ for a Traveling Population: the case of nomadic education in Mongolia |
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| This article deals with a particular ‘best practice’ in Mongolia (boarding schools) that neither traveled elsewhere nor was rescued from the socialist past and adopted in the post-socialist present. The boarding schools accommodating children from nomadic herder families have experienced a long decade (1991‑2003) of neglect. The boarding school system of the twenty-first century has ceased to be a universal institution catering to a nomadic population, and has been transformed into a socially stratified system that mostly attracts students from poor families (nomadic and otherwise) who could not afford to entertain alternative living arrangements for their school-aged children. The authors treat nomadic education in Mongolia as an interesting case of a ‘transfer vacuum.’ The authors investigate the political and economic reasons for this immunity towards ‘lessons from elsewhere’ or ‘lessons from the past,’ and draw conclusions for research on educational policy borrowing and lending. |
| Ownership of Education Reforms in the Kyrgyz Republic: kto v dome hozyain? |
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| An important subset of issues involved in describing the process of educational globalization emerges when considering the reception, response and/or rejection of international proposals, ideologies and agents by indigenous national and regional educators. This case study describes and discusses how foreign/Western education proposals and policies were solicited and then responded to by educators in the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan, now an independent country, between 2001 and 2004. It also discusses the pivotal role of one key figure in the process, the former minister of education in Kyrgyzstan, now responsible for a large World Bank project to improve rural education in that country. A powerful figure both in her own nation and in the eyes of foreign sponsors, both American and European, her biography continues to illustrate both possibilities and tensions between the former education system and international hopes and designs for school reform in the Kyrgyz Republic. |
| Traveling Policies: hijacked in Central Asia |
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| Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Central Asian education reform discourses have become increasingly similar to distinctive Western policy discourses traveling globally across national boundaries. Tracing the trajectory of ‘traveling policies’ in Central Asia, this article discusses the way Western education discourses have been hybridized in the encounter with collectivist and centralist cultures within post-socialist environments in Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan. In the context of international aid relationships, the article considers different motivations and driving forces for reforms, the way pre-Soviet and Soviet traditions are affirmed within the reforms, as well as how these reforms speak back to Western reform agenda. Emphasizing the historical legacy of Soviet centralist traditions, this article reveals how traveling policies have been ‘hijacked’ by local policy makers and used for their own purposes nationally. |
| Travelling Policy and Local Spaces in the Republic of Tajikistan: a comparison of the attitudes of Tajikistan and the World Bank towards textbook provision |
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| For newly independent Central Asian republics a debate has arisen about how much of the aims, content and pedagogy of old Soviet-era curricula to retain, how much to revise or replace, and with what. There is a need to replace and revise textbooks, which are wearing out and outdated. Financial crisis has made the financial support of external funding agencies necessary to do so, allowing these agencies great influence on choice of appropriate aims, objectives and pedagogy to be embodied in new textbooks, and thus on educational change in Central Asia. However, attitudes towards strengths and weaknesses of the existing system, and thus the need for change, may differ between Central Asian educational authorities and external donors. Policies recommended by external agencies may be accepted, adapted, resisted or rejected by local educators for various reasons. This study compares attitudes towards textbook provision policy expressed in two normative texts on educational needs in Tajikistan: one produced by Tajikistan authorities and one by the World Bank. While both express the importance of textbook development for educational reform, clear differences in priorities for textbook development and attitudes towards existing aims, content and pedagogies are identified. These differences suggest the need for increased dialogue between local authorities and external donors. Further, such dialogue should be extended to other key stakeholders in the reform process. |
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