HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL REFRACTIONS IN RECENT EDUCATION TRANSITIONS: THE EXAMPLE OF FORMER SOCIALIST EUROPEAN COUNTRIES

ABSTRACT

Thirty years after the demise of the Soviet bloc, there still persists a rhetoric of differentiation and a discursive polarisation between the Western and the non-Western educational thinking and practices. This rhetoric overshadows a potential similarity, or homogeneity, between the dominant and several marginalised contexts. Regional, local and personal variations are prematurely attributed to fundamental, if often poorly argued, cultural differences. We seek to introduce and to preliminarily summarise the existing understandings of refraction in education and social research. Sporadically used but seldom defined, the refraction metaphor appears to feature: (a) a multiplicity of viewpoints as an incentive for social research, (b) non-relativistic, scientific progress as an end value for understanding social reality, (c) a balanced approach towards homogeneity and heterogeneity in social research, and (d) a substantially historical orientation towards analysing homogeneity and heterogeneity. Education in the former socialist European countries demonstrates how heterogeneity is rhetorically overstated and how variations can be more adequately addressed by analysing refractions.

Keywords:

• refraction
• education policy
• education transition
• globalisation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Institutional Research Grant IUT18-2, ‘Teachers’ professionality and professionalism in changing context’, led by Ivor Goodson.