Educational policy‐making in post‐communist Ukraine as an example of emerging governmentality: discourse analysis of curriculum choice and assessment policy documents (1999–2003)

Abstract

Educational policy‐making in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) is still building upon the ambivalences and uncertainties of post‐communist transformation. The international support, expertise and discourses – coupled with communist legacies, stalled democratic developments and national discourses – produce unique effects on education in each of these countries. This paper is an attempt to conceptualise educational policy‐making (with its disparities between ‘democratised’ discourses and ‘Sovietised’ practices) as a form of emerging governmentality or governmentality‐in‐the‐making on the level of the state, using Ukraine as a case study. Analysing policy‐making through the perspective of emerging governmentality brings into focus the genealogy of post‐independent reforms, which is (as a part of the technologies of government) threaded into a broader governmental project of restructuring the state and legitimising its rationality. The final empirical part of the paper presents a discourse analysis of selected curriculum choice and assessment policy documents (1999–2003) and embedded in them the complex interplay of internal and external discourses, which work together to construct and justify the emerging governmental rationality of post‐communist Ukraine.

Keywords:

• educational policy‐making
• emerging governmentality
• genealogy of educational reforms
• post‐communist Ukraine

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my gratitude to my research supervisor Professor Diane Reay, who guided me through my research and offered continuous stimulating support and advice on my paper. I am grateful to the Cambridge Overseas Trust for awarding me a TNK‐BP Kapitza Scholarship that made my studies at the University of Cambridge possible. I want to thank Lachlan Moyle and Khadidjah Mattar for looking closely at the final version of my paper for English style and grammar and offering suggestions for improvement. I would like to give my special thanks to my parents for their love and to my former students from Tsyurupynska Gymnasium, Ukraine, who have helped me grow personally and professionally.

Notes

1. In education policy sociology, the works of Walkerdine (1986, 1988), Codd (1988), Marshall (1989, 1995, 1998), Ball (1990a, 1994), Fairclough (2000), Peters (2001a, 2001b, 2003), Peters and Wain (2002), J. Edwards (2003), Humes and Bryce (2003), Olssen (2003, 2006), Peters and Humes (2003), Davies (2004), Peters and Burbules (2004) and others (although advancing the methodological rather than the theoretical implications of Foucault’s thesis) explicitly draw on the concept of governmentality by linking it with regimes of truth, discourses, technologies of government and technologies of the self. Among those who work directly with the concept are Ball (1990a, 1990b, 1994), Peters (2001a, 2001b, 2003), R. Edwards (2002), J. Edwards (2003), Tikly (2003), Andersson and Fejes (2005), Christie and Sidhu (2006), Masschelein (2006), Pongratz (2006), Simons (2006, 2007) and others.

2. For a detailed discussion on ‘Using governmentality as a conceptual tool in education policy research’, see Fimyar (2008).

3. In further developing the conceptual framework for my research, I partly draw on Silova’s work (2002, 309), which moves away from theories which define the impact of globalisation on education primarily in terms of harmonisation, whether it be voluntary or imposed. Instead, I use the concept of ‘travelling policy’ (Alexiadou and Jones 2001; Seddon 2005) or ‘policy borrowing’ (Ball 2003, 2006; Ozga and Jones 2006) as a lens to capture globalisation processes in education.

4. The Ukrainian‐Russian language policies are still a very ‘sensitive’ issue, which in time of elections is tactically threaded into the electoral programmes of political candidates. Most often, these are populist declarations to make the Russian language the second official language in Ukraine, which is de facto the language of communication of over 50% of the population in the country. These declarations provoke disagreement in Western and Central Ukraine and found support and approval in Eastern and Southern Ukraine. However, these intentions have not yet informed policy changes on the national level aimed at reinstating Russian in the south and east of the country, the exception being the regional initiatives in the aftermath of the so‐called Orange Revolution of 2004, the discussion of which goes beyond the scope of this paper (cf. Arel 2005; Wilson 2005; Aslund and McFaul 2006).

5. For the purposes of analysis, the three policy documents will be referenced according to their original numbers in the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine (MESU) archive: The Law on General Secondary Education (1999) as No. 651‐XIV; The Directive on the Introduction of a 12‐point Grading Scale of Students’ Achievements in General Secondary Education (2000) as No. 428/48 and The Letter on Discussing the Draft of the Concept of Specialised Education in Upper Secondary Schools (2003) as No. 428/55.

6. In Ukraine, the school year starts on 1 September, which means the schools were to use the temporary evaluation criteria.

7. For more critique on competencies in education see Westera (2001, 75–88).