The atrocious war in Eastern Ukraine, shootings in Maidan, thousands of dead and internally displaced peoples is a painful modern-day reality in Ukraine. A symbolic break with Ukraine’s communist past, often referenced in studies on Ukrainian politics and society (e.g. Fimyar 2010, Ryabchuk 2002, Way 2008, Wilson 2005), has become real. The awakening to a new reality bought with it a painful realisation that the break up with the values and practices of the past is long overdue and has now come at a high human cost. ‘Apocalyptic’ scenarios from the early 1990s outlined in the commentaries similar to ‘Ukraine - The birth and possible death of the country’ (The Economist, 1 May 1994, cf. Riabchuk 2002), which seemed inconceivable at the time of publication, decades later are hanging over Ukraine’s future and are posing a real threat to security in a wider Europe. 

The events in Maidan also known as ‘The Revolution of Dignity have affected all spheres of social and political life in Ukraine, which is now being thought in terms of ‘before’ Maidan and ‘after’. Documenting the conflicting feelings the events in Maidan stirred in the general population, the Ukrainian media reported dignity on the one hand, and growing hatred toward the aggressor, fear, disillusionment and powerlessness on the other. Caught in these processes and conflicting emotions Ukrainian education system, which is now governed by a new political leadership, is desperately trying to cope with new and existing challenges including structural adjustments needed to accommodate 25 displaced universities from Eastern Ukraine and long standing problems of corruption, rising costs, hierarchy and inequalities, which have become more acute as a result of unleashed marketisation forces in Ukrainian education (Koshmanova and Ravchyna 2008, Fimyar 2010, Kovalchuk and Shchudlo 2014).

While the majority of studies of Ukrainian education focus on policy analysis level (Fimyar 2010, Halperina 2003), little attention has been paid to the analysis of teachers’ practices and beliefs with the exception of a few recent studies by Koshmanova and Ravchyna (2008) and Kovalchuk and Shchudlo (2014). The study presented here is a part of a larger project, which seeks to provide a systematic analysis of teachers’ views on pedagogy and changing power relationships between teacher and students after Maidan. Inspired by the Freire’s seminal work ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’, the study seeks to document the changes in teaching practices inspired by the events in Maidan. The particular questions the study seeks to address are: 1) What shifts in philosophy and practices of teaching educators in Lviv region, Western Ukraine, attribute to the events followed the Maidan Revolution?; 2) How did the events in Maidan affect communication and power relationships between teachers and students?; 3) What are the obstacles are yet to be overcome on the way of democratisation of schooling in post-Maidan Ukraine?

In its theoretical framing, the study combines Freire’s ideas of ‘dialogic practice’ (Freire 2006])  and Bakhtin’s ideas of ‘dialogism’  (Bakhtin 1981). In particular from Freire we borrow the understanding of a dialogue as an ‘epistemological relationship’, as a ‘way of knowing’ which highlights the social nature of human interaction and not merely as a techniques of ‘involv[ing] students in a particular task’ (2006, p. 17).  From Bakhtin, we borrow the notion of ‘dialogic orientation of discourse’ (Bakhtin 1981) summarised by Wertsch (1991, p. 53) as an ability of every utterance to respond ‘in some way to previous utterances and anticipate the responses of other, succeeding ones’. Such theoretical standpoint recognises dialogue as a value, which underpins the enquiry into the shifts in teaching practices and student-teacher relationships in a post-Maidan Ukraine.

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