Main Content
Session Information
23 SES 11 D, Still an Issue? Approaching and Challenging Post-Socialist and Post-Authoritarian Education: Difficulties, Routines and Innovations of Empirical Research
Symposium
Contribution
For more than two decades, scholars from different disciplines have been tracing the metamorphoses of educational policies and practices in post-socialist and post-authoritarian spaces. In producing their studies, these authors have constructed post-socialist places as something really existing and in ‘need of a fix’, generously offered by World Bank experts, international consultants, policy ‘entrepreneurs’ and academics. Many of these studies are based on an implicit idea of the relevancy of post-socialist and post-authoritarian path dependencies for education. The overreliance on path dependency framework for explaining educational developments in different kinds of post-authoritarian and post-socialist states and societies gave rise to a critique calling for alternative methodologies and explanatory frameworks. Do ‘post-socialist and post-authoritarian educational spaces’ invite a comparative approach or a single case methodology? Should a nation-state (or a withering of the nation-state as globalization and Europeanization theories contend), a market, or a network (as in a family, tribe or community) be a starting point for analysis? – are some of the questions articulated in the field.
Despite some valuable insights, mainstream discussions rarely include the views of the actors and authors who actually inhabit ‘post-socialist educational spaces’. Because of the language and other material and symbolic barriers, the West/East border in the field of research and academic debate remains closed and rarely cross-referenced.
The proposed symposium focuses on empirical approaches in researching and inhabiting ‘post-authoritarian and post-socialist educational spaces,’ challenging the tradition of speaking within the disciplinary, language and academic (East/West) borders.
The presentations aim to reflect on possibilities, problems, challenges, routines and non-reflected grand narratives of post-socialist and post-authoritarian educational research. Some of the questions to be explored are:
- Does post-socialism and post-authoritarianism still play a role in the conceptualisation and routine of empirical research on education?
- Which ‘classical’ trends can we observe in research on education within post-socialist and post-authoritarian spaces?
- How do the processes of globalisation, neoliberal expansion, European integration, etc. influence empirical research approaches?
- Which disciplines are occupied with the research on post-authoritarian and post-socialist spaces?
- Which empirical instruments have been developed in order to approach post-authoritarian and post-socialist education? What methodological debates are influencing research designs and research approaches?
- What is actually happening on the ground in terms of the ever-growing diversity of educational provision (state, private, home schooling,etc.)?
Through showcasing a number of case studies as varied as Russia, Germany, Estonia, Bulgaria, Portugal and Spain, the symposium explores, critically re-assesses and challenges popular frameworks of post-socialist and post-authoritarian education, seeking to establish a common methodological perspective to conceptualise ongoing educational change.
Programme by Network 2019
00. Central Events (Keynotes, EERA-Panel, EERJ Round Table, Invited Sessions)
Network 1. Continuing Professional Development: Learning for Individuals, Leaders, and Organisations
Network 2. Vocational Education and Training (VETNET)
Network 3. Curriculum Innovation
Network 4. Inclusive Education
Network 5. Children and Youth at Risk and Urban Education
Network 6. Open Learning: Media, Environments and Cultures
Network 7. Social Justice and Intercultural Education
Network 8. Research on Health Education
Network 9. Assessment, Evaluation, Testing and Measurement
Network 10. Teacher Education Research
Network 11. Educational Effectiveness and Quality Assurance
Network 12. LISnet - Library and Information Science Network
Network 13. Philosophy of Education
Network 14. Communities, Families and Schooling in Educational Research
Network 15. Research Partnerships in Education
Network 16. ICT in Education and Training
Network 17. Histories of Education
Network 18. Research in Sport Pedagogy
Network 19. Ethnography
Network 20. Research in Innovative Intercultural Learning Environments
Network 22. Research in Higher Education
Network 23. Policy Studies and Politics of Education
Network 24. Mathematics Education Research
Network 25. Research on Children's Rights in Education
Network 26. Educational Leadership
Network 27. Didactics – Learning and Teaching
Network 28. Sociologies of Education
Network 29. Reserach on Arts Education
Network 30. Research on Environmental und Sustainability Education
Network 31. Research on Language and Education (LEd)
Network 32. Organizational Education
The programme is updated regularly (each day in the morning)
Marginal Content
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.