Here is a roundup of research projects that Eurasia SIG members have been working on in 2015. By making people aware of ongoing projects, we hope to help facilitate or build bridges within the community to produce collaborative, robust, and innovative work.
Teachers as Reform Changers: How Senior Teachers in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan Impact Education Reforms (Raisa Belyavina, Teachers College, Columbia University, raisab@gmail.com)
This dissertation project examines how global education reforms that are introduced in countries without accounting for local contexts can disrupt social hierarchies and organizational structures within schools and society. Specifically, the study investigates the ongoing implementation of a teacher salary reform in the Kyrgyz Republic that aims to attract new teachers to the profession, raise the level of education of teachers, and improve the quality of teaching. While this reform, which was commenced in 2011, followed a well-intentioned agenda and was positioned to align Kyrgyzstan with global education goals, what was not taken into account was the inadvertently deleterious impact the reform would have at the school and individual levels. The study looks at the unintended consequences of this reform, particularly its impacts on senior teachers (those who have spent most or all of their career in teaching and are now nearing retirement age) in the capital city of Bishkek, who found themselves to be the “losers” of the reform. This project aims to understand not only how reforms impact teachers but also how teachers who are adversely impacted by policy shifts in the education sector utilize their individual and collective agency and draw on their social networks within and outside of schools to modify or undo reforms.
Transnational Youth Activism in the Times of Crisis (Alla Korzh, School for International Training Graduate Institute, alla.korzh@sit.edu, and Serhiy Kovalchuk, University of Toronto, serhiy.kovalchuk@utoronto.ca).
Situated within the scholarly themes of transnational activism, social movement mobilization and action, and citizenship education, this qualitative case study examines civic activism of transnational Ukrainian youth in the United States during and after the Euromaidan protests. In particular, it explores the catalyzing forces that motivated a group of young Ukrainians to join and support the Euromaidan movement from abroad; the opportunities that transnational activism created for their informal citizenship education; and the impact of the youth’s civic activism in Ukraine and the United States. This project focuses on the activities of the non-profit organization Razom (“Together”) established by a group of young Ukrainians in New York City in the wake of the Euromaidan protests in support of democracy, human rights, and social justice in Ukraine.
Children’s Place Making in a Globalising World (Zsuzsanna Millei, School of Education, University of Newcastle, zsuzsanna.millei@newcastle.edu.au)
This comparative project explores how children make their place in the global world of preschools in Australia and Hungary using a form of global ethnography. A subsection of this project concerns children as national subjects using theorizing on spatial politics and concepts of political subject formation and agency. In relation to this project, two special issues in journal “Global Studies of Childhood” (2014 and 2015) and a co-edited book on Childhoods and Nation Interdisciplinary Engagements (Critical Cultural Studies of Childhood series, Palgrave MacMillan, 2015) have been recently published by. The book currently under development and contracted with Teachers College Press New York is titled “Nation and Childhoods: Imaginaries in a Transnational World” (2017). It is co-written with Professor Iveta Silova and concerns comparatively the ways in which young children ‘learn and act the nation’ in two post-socialist and two liberal democratic societies.
Transnational Dynamics in Quality Assurance and Evaluation Politics of Basic Education in Brazil, China and Russia (Nelli Piattoeva, School of Education, University of Tampere, nelli.piattoeva@uta.fi)
This project is funded by the Academy of Finland under the research program “The Future of Learning, Knowledge and Skills” in 2014–2017. Evaluation and quality have grown into major policy issues in education across the world, simultaneously acting as powerful steering mechanisms on national and transnational levels. The research aims to explore the current quality assurance and evaluation policies and practices in school education in the selected countries: the national policy objectives and their possible links to the transnational policy agenda, the actors and actor relations that stem from and are shaped by the existing and emerging policies and the practices of quality evaluation on the local level. The research data combines policy documents, interviews with policy makers and experts, and school ethnography.
Teacher Training, Assessment, and Graduate School Experiences in Kazakhstan and Central Asia (Duishonkul Shamatov, Graduate School of Education, Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan, duishonkul.shamatov@nu.edu.kz)
Duishon has been involved in a number of research projects: “Pre-Service Teacher Education and its Appropriateness to the Requirements of the New Curriculum and Education Reform in Kazakhstan” (in cooperation with the University of Cambrdige), “Exploring National Policymakers’ Conceptualization and Use of International Large Scale Assessments” (in cooperation with Jason Sparks and David Rutkowski), “Experiences of PhD Students in Kazakhstan’s Universities with the Requirement of Impact Factor Publication” and “Voices of Local Scholars in a Western-Driven Research in Central Asia.”
Historiography of National Leaders: Symbolic Representations in School Textbooks from Around the World (Tatyana Tsyrlina-Spady, School of Education, Seattle Pacific University, tsyrlina@aol.com and Michael Lovorn, University of Pittsburgh, mlovorn@pitt.edu)
The aim of this project is to prepare a scholarly volume that will explore, analyze, and contextualize representations of historical leaders and national heroes in different countries throughout the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries. Contributors to the scholarly volume are encouraged to select up to seven national leaders/ heroes from their designated country, and reflect upon how these individuals are portrayed in national history textbooks published during the last 5-7 years. We are particularly interested in examining the following questions/prompts: (1) How are these leaders and/or heroes represented? (2) What and whether visual imagery is used in association with each leader/hero? and (3) What patriotic, moral, or ideological agendas are involved in verbal and visual descriptions of leaders and heroes. Those interested in contributing to the project should contact Tatyana Tsyrlina-Spady and Michael Lovorn.
