Numerous surveys suggest that countries in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus are at high risk of corruption and that education in those countries is particularly affected by that risk (Transparency International, 2013). Nevertheless, comprehensive reforms to strengthen integrity and fight corruption in the sector are still rare (OECD, 2018) and education is still struggling to address the problem in a systematic way (UNESCO IIEP, 2015).

Part of the challenge with corruption in education is the difficulty to determine what practices in education count as corrupt and identify how conditions in the sector might be motivating education participants to engage in misconduct (Milovanovitch, 2019). Another is that corruption is traditionally studied by registering the frequency of corruption events, or through perception surveys (McDevitt, 2013), but the actual experiences of those involved are rarely accounted for through these methodologies. Corruption concerns aspects of human behaviour that do not easily render themselves to the more traditional methodologies, cannot be captured in the usual ways and stay hidden even through qualitative methodologies such as interviews due to the sensitivity of the issues and potential risks that the interviewee could face.

The goal of our study is to contribute to a better understanding of the human side of experiences connected to acts of corruption in education as conveyed by those involved: educators, parents, civil society and authorities. Our focus is on inclusive education (IE).

In many Eurasian countries, IE is a relatively new priority that is envisioned to create more equitable and just societies, but which also brings a number of challenges. These include resistance to change, a historic legacy of special education systems and institutions, questions about managing the inevitable clashes between old practices and novelties (Kovač Cerović, Jovanović, Pavlović Babić, 2016), and how to translate new policies into manageable working practices (Rose, Shevlin, Winter, O’Raw, & Zhao, 2012). Such dilemmas are quite common to countries in Eurasia and may put IE at risk of being confronted with corrupt practices, abolished or faked.

For its approach, our study borrows conceptual and theoretical elements from an education integrity assessment framework developed by the OECD (INTES framework) and applies a dynamic storytelling methodology (DSM) (Daiute, 2014) to collect evidence. INTES combines elements of public sector integrity assessments with a focus on the conduct, context, and motives of education participants to engage in integrity violations (OECD, 2018), while the DSM has proven its advantages as a solution to the otherwise difficult task of eliciting reflections on sensitive issues and integrating diverging stakeholder narratives around problems that call for policy, practice and research interventions (Daiute & Kovacs-Cerovic, 2017).

In our paper we are presenting an analysis of narratives (letters and stories) by education stakeholders in Kazakhstan and Armenia, generated through a DSM and guided by the INTES framework. The research question addressed by our analysis is: How do stakeholders in IE in these two countries transform and adjust the broader narratives of their environment and society about integrity of education and inclusion of students who need additional support? What kind of situations do they identify, and which kind of experiences do they convey as important regarding integrity in IE through their narratives and letters? Our findings contribute to a better understanding of the situational and human complexities involved in and around acts of corruption in the context of IE. At the same time, we are also exploring the potentials of the narrative analysis methodology to disentangle those complexities.

At the time of this submission, we have analysed the evidence from Kazakhstan, but the paper we will present, will also include the results for Armenia.

The research presents a new phase in an ongoing study of integrity of inclusive education (Milovanovitch, et al., 2017; Jovanović et al., 2018). Data collection was embedded in a three-day workshop which aimed to develop recommendations for strengthening integrity in inclusive education. The sample in Kazakhstan included 14 representatives from different stakeholder groups (parents, teachers, researchers, government representatives), who wrote two types of texts each (28 texts altogether). The Armenian sample is expected to be of similar structure and size. At the beginning of the workshop participants were asked to think of a typical example of integrity violation related to inclusive education from their own experience, something they heard about or could imagine. Furthermore, they were asked to write about what happened, who was involved and how they felt. At the end of the workshop, participants were given their initial stories and asked to amend them with information of relevance from the perspective of integrity violations. The instruction for writing a letter included: “Write a letter to a colleague who will engage in developing inclusive education integrity at education and/or in his/her community. Give him/her suggestions on what not to forget, what to avoid, what to rely on and what to hope for, when it comes to integrity in inclusive education.” The unit of analysis was each sentence or thought – around 260 units in the 28 analysed texts. All texts were coded in the English translation from the local languages. A value analysis was performed, identifying at the level of each unit beliefs, norms, values, important details, participants choose to express. The list of values was generated from iterative analyses of increasing subsets of texts, preparation of a coding manual with coding criteria and examples, and intercoder reliability check. A total of 29 values were identified by the analysis, clustered under four wider groups of values - those pinpointing situations when integrity violations occur (27% of code units with 11 values, such as school placement limitations, teacher characteristics and attitudes, assessment procedures), those expressing individual experiences (17% of units with 4 values, such as affective reactions, personal qualities, experience of lagging behind, or of learning and development), socially mediated negative experiences (22% units, 7 values, e.g. dishonesty and manipulation, discrimination, rejection, withdrawal, conflict) and socially mediated positive experiences (33% units 8 values, e.g. cooperation, active agency, searching for solutions, including, accepting).

The analysis of letters and stories shows distinct patterns. It is noteworthy that the importance of cooperation (18.2%; “You should always have a dialogue with all participants in the child's learning process”), respecting differences (10.9%; “Teach children how to learn, find their strengths”), along with the value of equal opportunities (9.1%; “Dear friend, remember that every child should have equal opportunities”) and positive affective reactions (9.1%; “I have noticed with how much love you speak about your students”) frame the main messages of the letters, while most of the other values are just marginally identifiable. The letters seem to echo policies and expressions of commitment of participants to inclusive education. On the other hand, the stories are rich in detail, characters, situations, and convey an exceptionally wide array of experiences. They shed light on the everyday human stories, quests, and struggles which participants chose to express. The stories were told around dishonesty and manipulation (7.8%; “During the midterm exams she added points to those she liked”), negative affective reactions (5.9%, “For me it was a very painful process”), identifying discrimination, lack of teachers’ knowledge, placement restrictions, as well as experiences of lagging behind the peers, or active engagement and search for solutions as the most prominent values. In this paper we provide a thorough analysis of the expressions across genres, and we highlight and compare results of the narrative value analysis also across the participating countries and types of stakeholders. We expect that the results of our analysis, by pinpointing the lived and acted human side of integrity related events and by the virtue of expressing the echoed norms and beliefs of relevant stakeholders, will further the striving for ensuring integrity and developing inclusive education, as well as offer a novel methodology for future researches with mixed-methods design.

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