Session Information
26 SES 13 A, Institutional Autonomy and Educational Reform in Central Asia
Symposium
Contribution
Notions of ‘autonomy’ feature widely in official papers and in discussions about school reform in Kazakhstan. The term is applied to everything from an ‘autonomous boiler room’ which was causing one school director we interviewed all sorts of grief via autonomous schools to a major ‘Autonomous Educational Organisation’ such as Nazarbayev Intellectual Schools, which is exempt from the ‘laws’ and regulations that apply to the rest of the system. But how is this notion of autonomy to be understood in these contexts, and what are the ‘policy rationalities’ that lie behind its application? We shall (i) examine some of the sources for the advocacy of school autonomy in international literature and experience; (ii) consider how Soviet thinking and post-Soviet neo liberal ideas have framed contemporary discussion in Kazakhstan of the notion of autonomy; (iii) examine the discourse of autonomy in contemporary official documents and laws; (iv) compare how the concept is understood at school level through data gathered from interviews with, in particular, school directors; (v)examine what different notions of accountability are attached to different ideas of autonomy and (vi) consider how school autonomy might impact on the professional identities of teachers and school directors.
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