Abstract
As the former socialist countries of Southeastern/Central Europe and the former Soviet Union have embarked on their journeys from authoritarian to democratic societies in the early 1990s, education systems across the region have experienced major changes. From curriculum revision to education finance reforms, virtually no aspect of the education systems has remained untouched. While all post-socialist reform efforts have striven for large-scale, sustainable change, some initiatives were more successful than others, and many reform efforts were short-lived. Focusing on pre-service teacher education reform in Latvia, this article seeks to understand how educational leadership contributes to sustainability of educational reform in the dynamic context of post-socialist education transformation processes.
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Notes
For example, Silova and Steiner-Khamsi (2008) observe how educational policymakers in the countries of the former socialist bloc have used remarkably similar education reform rhetoric consisting of the following package: extension of the curriculum to 11 or 12 years of schooling, introduction of new subjects (e.g., English and computer literacy), student-centered learning, electives in upper secondary schools, introduction of standards and/or outcomes-based education (OBE), decentralization of educational finance and governance, reorganization (or “rationalization”) of schools, privatization of higher education, standardization of student assessment, liberalization of textbook publishing, and the establishment of education management and information systems.
Iveta Silova served as a program coordinator for the Soros Foundation-Latvia from 1997 until 1999 and was directly responsibly for overseeing the project, Developing Skills for Experiential and Cooperative Learning in Latvian Teacher Education, which later developed into a professional association, Latvian Association for Cooperation in Education. While such a close involvement with the project could potentially bias our findings, we attempted to transform it into an asset. In particular, Silova’s in-depth knowledge of the project and its participants provided easy access to our respondents. It also allowed us to work comfortably and naturally with the material and the project participants engendering a trust that might not otherwise have existed within the interviews. In light of this, we tried to account for any possible bias by presenting a variety of responses to the same question or theme even when they did not support our own theory.
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Webster, C., Silova, I., Moyer, A. et al. Leading in the age of post-socialist education transformations: Examining sustainability of teacher education reform in Latvia. J Educ Change 12, 347–370 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10833-010-9152-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10833-010-9152-8