Bologna Process
Today at CESS 2018: Roundtable on Central Asian Encounters with the European Higher Education Area
If you should find yourself in Pittsburgh, PA, today – October 27, 2018 – please join us at the Central Eurasian Studies Society’s 2018 Annual Conference for our roundable on Global Bolognaization: Central Asian Encounters with the European Higher Education Area.
Followers of my blog may remember the call for proposals that co-convenor Aliya Akatayeva and I put out at the end of last year when we first started planning the roundtable. We had an excellent response and our original line-up of panellists included colleagues from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan (and me!) all ready to share experiences and analyses of the impact of the European Union inspired Bologna Process reforms on higher education in Central Asia.
Fast forward several months and here we are at an excellent CESS conference in Pittsburgh (check out conference activity on Twitter: #CESS2018atPitt).
At our roundtable today, we will be taking three directions of travel to reflect the research and experiences of the three panellists who will be present:
Professor Gulnara Mendikulova, a distinguished scholar of Kazakh and world history, will set the general scene for the roundtable, considering questions such as: what is the history of the Bologna Process across Central Asia? What were the drivers for Kazakhstan to adopt the Bologna Process? What have been the challenges and opportunities presented by the reforms?
Aliya Akatayeva, Head of the Social Studies Department at Satbayev University (Kazakhstan), will focus on the knotty issue of academic freedom. Whilst academic freedom – including autonomy for universities – is a core value of the European Union higher education ‘package’, there are a number of tensions and challenges in embedding this broad principle in Kazakhstan. As one of the universities in the country that has been given some degree of autonomy under a 2017 law, she will offer a case study of the journey of Satbayev University towards academic freedom.
I will discuss Tajikistan, not (yet) a signatory to the Bologna Process but aspiring to follow in the footsteps of Kazakhstan and become one. By highlighting findings from in-depth interviews in two cities in the country, I will draw out the experiences of some of the faculty members who are on the front line in living with the new higher education reforms. Whilst many are positive about the potential of related changes to the curriculum on the quality of the learning experience, others expressed resistance and resentment towards a series of changes they felt they were not consulted on or given time to adapt to.
We’d love to see you at the roundtable – 11am today in Posvar 4217!
Watch the webinar on higher education transformations in Eurasia
If you missed the webinar on higher education transformations in Eurasia that I participated in recently, fear not! The webinar is now available online and you can enjoy it (again, and again) at your leisure.
Please go to https://fccdl.in/Hq5jfVQxo to watch the webinar.
First to present is Dariya Platonova of the Higher School of Economics National Research University in Russia. This presentation is on the expansion and institutional transformations of higher education systems in post-Soviet countries.
The second presenter is Aliya Kuzhabekova of Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan. The presentation is on building research capacity in Kazakhstan: from challenges and strategies of local scholars to contributions of international faculty.
Last but not least was my presentation on faculty perceptions of European higher education reforms in Tajikistan. Watch me from minute 30-45.
In my presentation, I talked about how the Bologna Process is being implemented in Tajikistan, a theme that turned up in most of my thesis interviews in summer 2017 although it wasn’t an area I was specifically investigating. I shared some of opinions offered by the academics I interviewed about these reforms and offered some emerging themes that I would be keen to discuss further.
One interviewee offered a superb metaphor to describe the implementation of European education reforms:
We put on a European dress on a fully Tajik body…
That person went on to say:
We didn’t look at quality, we didn’t change content or philosophy. We reported to the donor, we did everything on paper. But we haven’t done anything in practice.”
A lot of food for thought just from those brief sentences.
Happy to share my presentation if it’s of interest, though it mainly consists of quotes from interviewees. Do watch the webinar if you can!
As ever, I spent too much time introducing my topic so had to miss out a discussion of a really interesting recent PhD thesis by Gulnara Tampayeva from 2016. Dr Tampayeva’s thesis “The Implementation of the Bologna Process in Kazakhstan Higher Education: Views from within”, explores similar issues to my presentation but from the Kazakh context. You can access her thesis here and I recommend it.
Call for papers – “Global Bolognaization”: Central Asian Encounters with the European Higher Education Area
Are you a Central Asia based academic or practitioner with direct experience of the Bologna Process/European Higher Education Area? If so, we want to hear from you!
I am co-Chair of a proposal for a roundtable at the European Consortium of Political Researchers (ECPR) General Conference, which will be held in August 2018 in Hamburg, Germany.
The roundtable is called:
Global Bolognaization:
Central Asian Encounters with the European Higher Education Area
The call for papers is below and attached: CfP Global Bolognaization – ECPR 2018_forcirculation. Please share widely with your networks.
Paper proposals are due by January 10, 2018.
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ECPR 2018 General Conference, Hamburg, Germany, August 22-25, 2018
Call for proposals
Within the ECPR Section Politics of Higher Education, Research and Innovation, we invite proposals for a roundtable on:
Global Bolognaization:
Central Asian Encounters with the European Higher Education Area
Abstract
The Bologna Process has now spread far beyond the borders of the European Union, a process we call Global Bolognaization. This makes it critical to understand how European higher education ideas and reforms are being transferred to other settings and what impact this is having in these expanded spaces.
This roundtable focuses on the ways in which the Bologna Process is impacting the region of Central Asia and its constituent countries of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. All five states have been engaging with the Bologna Process for some time: Kazakhstan has been a full member of the the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) since 2010; European-inspired reforms in the other Central Asian states are either ongoing or currently in the process of being implemented. Yet Central Asia is currently on the periphery of the EHEA, not just geographically but in terms of academic/practitioner research.
As such, the purpose of this roundtable is to bring the Central Asian experience of Global Bolognaization to the fore. As far as possible, presentations at this roundtable will be by academics and practitioners with first-hand experience of the EHEA as it is being encountered in Central Asia. We welcome research based case studies of how the Bologna Process has impacted individual or groups of higher education institutions, faculty members, students, and the public; comparative studies between and beyond institutions and/or Central Asian states; and reflective studies on the prospects of the Bologna Process in Central Asia.
Proposal requirements
All proposals for this roundtable must have an analytical component, even if they are empirical studies. Where appropriate, participants should draw on a theoretical or conceptual framework that is a suitable match for the Special Interest Group’s theme of the Politics of Higher Education, Research and Innovation.
Roundtable details
We will select up to five papers for inclusion in this roundtable.
At the conference, each presenter will give a brief presentation (5-7 minutes) and must submit a short paper before the conference (2,000-3,000 words, in English). After the presentations, there will be a moderated discussion between the presenters and the audience lasting around one hour.
The roundtable will be conducted in English.
How to apply
Email a Word document to the two roundtable Chairs – emma.sabzalieva@mail.utoronto.ca and akatayeva@mail.ru – by midnight Astana time on Wednesday January 10, 2018 with the following information:
Title of your paper:
Abstract (300-500 words):
Keywords (3-8) indicating the subject, theme and scope of the paper:
Presenter’s name:
Presenter’s email address:
Presenter’s institution:
If you have a co-author(s), please also include their name(s), email address(es) and institution(s).
Late or incomplete applications will not be accepted.
Roundtable Chairs
Emma Sabzalieva, PhD Candidate, University of Toronto, Canada; emma.sabzalieva@mail.utoronto.ca; http://emmasabzalieva.com.
Dr Aliya Akatayeva, Head, Social Studies Department, Satbayev Research University, Kazakhstan; akatayeva@mail.ru.
Section abstract for the Special Interest Group Politics of Higher Education, Research and Innovation
Knowledge policies are at the forefront of contemporary global politics and are seen as the foundation on which societies coalesce and economies thrive. This Section builds on the previous six Sections on the Europe of Knowledge and invites contributions to consider the various dimensions of knowledge policy development.
Specifically, we are interested in theoretical, empirical, and comparative contributions that investigate the role of politics and policy in the global, multi-level, multi-issue, and multi-actor governance of knowledge. By role, we refer to effects that ideas, actors (both individual and organisational), policy instruments/mixes, and institutions have had on the governance of knowledge, and vice-versa. We focus on roles to enable a multidisciplinary discussion on whether these factors share defining characteristics across different knowledge policy domains (i.e. research, higher education, and innovation), and between distinct governance levels and geographical regions.
This Section continues to welcome scholars, globally, from all theoretical and methodological approaches to critically discuss the reconfiguration of knowledge systems around the world.
