Local Agency's Capacity for Adaptation of International Education Transfer.

Author(s):

Kairat Kurakbayev(presenting / submitting)Murat Orunkhanov(presenting)

Conference:

ECER 2016

Network:

17. Histories of Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

17 SES 04, Internationalization (Part 2)

Paper Session continued from 17 SES 03 B

Time:

2016-08-24

09:00-10:30

Room:

OB-H2.40

Chair:

Hans-Ulrich Grunder

Contribution

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, post-socialist states have gradually become a massive social laboratory for educational researchers, especially, Western scholars focusing on post-Soviet contexts from the perspective of comparative and international education, and history of education. However, despite this growth in educational research in the region, to date, in the context of post-Soviet Central Asian countries, there has been little empirical research highlighting how local education practitioners and university leaders interpret international educational transfer and reception of policy borrowing in their local contexts. Following the works by Weick (1995) and Crossley (2010), this paper examines the role of local agency in adapting educational importation and thus provides critical evaluation of international educational transfer and local adaptation expressing voices of local education stakeholders. Given that recontextualisation represents the ‘fields of contest’ (Muller, 1998, in Ball, 1998, p.127), this paper argues that context matters (Crossley, 2009) and informed awareness of social and cultural differences is of paramount importance in constructing local meaning of international policy borrowing (Weick, 1995).

Over the last two decades or so, research on policy trajectories and practices in the post-socialist bloc has been characterized by a prescriptive pattern of implementing Western educational models as well as active adaptation of “travelling policies” (Bain, 2010; Silova, 2011). Rationales for international policy borrowing – and the processes associated with implementation of borrowed policies and practices - are always complex, triggering serious critiques about the implications of the transfer of Western academic practices for national education development (Heyneman, 2011; Silova, 2010; Merrill, 2012).

Discussing educational transformations in the post-Soviet Central Asia, we have to take into account that “the countries of the region were not a tabula rasa” (Silova and Steiner-Khamsi, 2008, p. 3). It is worth noting that there was a time when education in the Soviet Union had been internationally recognised as progressive and advanced. As Graham (1993, 4) observes, “the history of Soviet science and technology contains impressive achievements, many of them little known in the West”. During the 1960s, education, especially in the field of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) could have claimed itself as ‘best practice’ for the rest of the world community. Academic achievements of the USSR consequently have had a triggering effect on placing education as a national priority among US policy makers of that time (Clowse, 1981).As the findings will show, the nostalgia for the Soviet education still lingers in the minds of the Soviet era’s generation. As Silova states, “travelling policies” have increasingly clashed with a strong desire of education policymakers in the region to maintain Soviet education legacies and, in some cases, revive pre-Soviet traditions” (Silova , 2011: 3)

With the fall of ‘iron curtain’ and the resulting post-Soviet states’ national independence, it was up to every nation to engage with or disregard ‘international circulation of ideas’ (Popkewitz, 1996, as cited in Ball, 1998, p. 123). Newly independent states claimed to develop values of democracy and open society. This triggered countries of the post-socialist bloc to to dismantle the Soviet ideology of education and engage with adapting internationally dominant trends in education that seemed to work in their social contexts, e.g. Bologna Process and decentralisation of higher education.

This paper will present local actors' discussions and opinions from the inside of Kazakhstan’s higher education system. Extensive literature review and qualitative data derived from the interviews with key education stakeholders amplifies that in the polyphony of opinions in the field of comparative education and globalization studies, voices of local actors representing post-socialist societies have remained under-represented in the post-Soviet Kazakhstan.

Method

The paper draws on the qualitative research framework. Focusing on the research partici-pants not as passive observers but rather as active participants of international educational borrowing, we have aimed to interpret the participants’ meaning and sensemaking of the current environment in the higher education sector. In other words, as Creswell (2009, p. 175) states, “in the entire qualitative research process, the researcher keeps a focus on learning the meaning that the participants hold about the problem or issue”. As qualiitative researchers, we have delved into opportunities and challenges of critical reflec-tion, as “the detached, depersonalized and ‘uncontaminated’ account of research that is of-ten presented is arguably a very powerful and well-rehearsed ‘illusion’” (King & Horrocks, 2010, p. 127). The premise of the study is based on the view that the state-led international policy borrow-ing representing institutional transformational change necessitates complex processes of social construction of local meaning and ownership. The study was guided by the following research questions: How do local actors mediate their local agency and global forces as they introduce and implement transformational changes in a given social context? How do they utilize their local capacity to reconcile educational importation and the legacies of the past? We have found interviews and focus groups to be a very relevant method to understand how local practitioners made sense of international policy borrowing. We conducted semi-structured interviews and focus groups. We were mainly interested in the ways in which the following categories of research participants made sense of transformational change: 1) faculty members of public higher education institutions; 2) leaders of public universities; 3) local administrators of research centres; 4) local representatives of international donor agency. With the total number of 16 interviews, we interacted with six respondents through focus groups and ten participants through individual one-on-one interviews as well as in-ternet interviews. The research interviews and focus groups focused on the following: 1) the role of international policy borrowing in bringing about institutional transformational change at one’s home university; 2) perceptions of success and failure of transformational change; 3) ways in which Kazakhstan’s higher education institutions develop their own identity and mediate local and global forces. The interviews were transcribed and coded through NVIVO software. The coding exercise led us to find “(…) repetitive patterns of ac-tion and consistencies in human affairs as documented in the data” (Saldana, 2013, p. 5).

Expected Outcomes

The cases under scrutiny are an attempt to understand transformational changes from the perspectives of local agency and local actors' sensemaking patterns. The qualitative data analysis has provided the following categories: 1) Reducing the crisis of education and dealing with uncertainty during the early 1990’s of the post-Soviet era; 2) Seeking and negotiating room for flexibility in the entrenched and fixed structure of the academic system; 3) Overcoming path dependence in decision-making; 4) Sustaining past practices and bringing them into dialogue with new ones; 5) Maintaining local agency and responsibility for the policy implementation. The themes interact with each other and characterize processes of the renewal in the post-Soviet educational space and pressure of global forces.

References

Ball, S. (1994). Education reform: A critical and post-structural approach. McGraw-Hill International. Ball, S. J. (1998). Big policies/small world: An introduction to international perspectives in education policy. Comparative Education, 34 (2), 119-130. Bridges, D. (2014) The ethics and politics of the international transfer of educational policy and Practice. Ethics and Education, 9 (1), 84-96. Clowse, B. B. (Ed.). (1981). Brainpower for the Cold War: The Sputnik Crisis and National Defense Education Act of 1958 (No. 3). Greenwood Publishing Group. Creswell, J.W. 2009. Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative and Mixed Methods Ap-proaches.Thousand Oaks: Sage. Crossley (2010) Context matters in educational research and international development: Learning from the small states experience. Prospects, 40, 421-429. Graham, L.R. (1993) Science in Russia and the Soviet Union: a short history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heyneman, S.P. 2011. “A Comment on the Changes in Higher Education in the Post-Soviet Union.” European Education 42 (1), 76-87. Kezar, A. (2012) Understanding sensemaking/sensegiving in transformational change pro-cesses from the bottom up. Higher Education, 65, 761-780. King, N., & Horrocks, C. (2010). Interviews in qualitative research. London: Sage. Ochs (2006) Cross-national policy borrowing and educational innovation: improving achievement in the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham. Oxford Review of Education, 32 (5), 599-618. Saldana, J. (2013) The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers. London: Sage. Samoff, J. (1999). Education sector analysis in Africa: limited national control and even less national ownership. International Journal of Educational Development, 19(4), 249-272. Silova, I. (Ed.). (2010). Globalization on the margins: Education and postsocialist trans-formations in Central Asia. IAP. Silova, I., & Steiner-Khamsi, G. (Eds.). (2008). How NGOs react: Globalization and educa-tion reform in the Caucasus, Central Asia and Mongolia. Kumarian Press. Steiner-Khamsi, G. (2012) The global/local nexus in comparative policy studies: analysing the triple bonus system in Mongolia over time. Comparative Education, 48 (4), 455-471. Weick, K. E. (1988). Enacted Sensemaking in Crisis Situations. Journal of Management Studies, 25(4), 305-317. Weick, K. (1995) Sensemaking in organizations. London: Sage.

Author Information

Kairat Kurakbayev (presenting / submitting)

Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan

Murat Orunkhanov (presenting)