Session Information
23 SES 09 C, European Lifelong Learning in Post-Soviet Societies: Case of Russia and the Baltics
Symposium
Contribution
Institutional and societal changes in Europe during last decades has meant ever closer integration to the core of EU and the simultaneous openness to different effects of globalisation in nation states and EU as a whole.
In March 2000, the then 15 European leaders committed the European Union to become by 2010 “the most dynamic and competitive knowledge based economy in the world, capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion, and respect for the environment”. As part of the Lisbon strategy, the European Union has set the goal of raising the number of adults participating in lifelong learning to 12.5% by 2010. However, the proportion of learning adults in Europe differs widely across countries already within EU 15, let alone EU 27+.
The experiences of post-socialist countries in Europe can be distinguished from that of EU 15 by their symbolic high-speed “return” to Europe – in practice, in rhetoric, in terms of values. Contrary to many other areas, in the area of lifelong learning this has meant going through a period of sharp decrease of chances to participate, followed by a sharp increase in opportunities on offer in those countries. That was accompanied by restructuring, vanishing and creating of new institutions.
In this session we analyse and compare the experiences from postsocialist countries that used to belong to Soviet Union and thus shared institutional arrangement to a widest degree. Other postsocialist countries, as well as these, have ever since the societal change chosen diverging institutional as well as political arrangements – or have they? 20 years later, there is still lack of comparative research on these countries in the context of Europeanization of lifelong learning practices and policies, and especially of their effects.
We are relying on original comparative research of an international project “Towards a Lifelong Learning Society in Europe: the contribution of the education system”, that is co-financed by European Commissionand involves researchers from thirteen countries in Europe. The project is dedicated to identifying the reasons behind these differences and to studying the policies and practices related to adults’ participation in and access to lifelong learning in a number of European countries.
Here we target at discovering the peculiarities of European post-socialism and post-USSR capitalism in Europe in the area of lifelong learning, and more specifically we examine how institutions have changed and how they channel learning to individuals, creating and removing barriers.
To compare postsocialist development in lifelong learning, especially non-formal subsection of it, and discuss it in the context of institutional change, different perspectives will be presented: country-studies on Russia and on Baltic states; comparison of postsocialist and other EU member states; and discussion of the policy-relevant developments in Europe. In the core of the analysis will be the shift in ideologies.
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.