The implementation of the Bologna Process in Kazakhstan higher education: views from within

Abstract

In this thesis I examine the question: how do Kazakhstan academics respond to the reforms of higher education (HE) carried out as part of Europeanisation? I study the local academics’ accounts of the process of implementation of the Bologna Process and of wider Western education standards within local post-Soviet practice, since the beginning of the twenty-first century. This local policy implementation is examined within the framework of educational policy borrowing, grounded in works by Steiner-Khamsi, Silova, and Phillips. Thirty-eight interviews were conducted in four HE institutions in different regions of Kazakhstan and analysed through the application of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) based on work by van Dijk and Fairclough. Using the method of CDA, I explore how power relationships and abuses of power play out between the educational authority and the academics in the politically driven reform environment, and how academics respond to this in their views of the reforms. I found that participants overall are critical of the reform process. They respond with three discourses, identified as nostalgia and loss, progress and modernity and chaotic reform. While the discourse of nostalgia implicitly connects to the ‘better’ Soviet education, as an ideological belief inherited from the past, and the discourse of progress reflects the spread of the ideology of European modernity, they both appear in connection to the central discourse of chaotic reformation. I found that chaos, which is a prime characteristic of the reforms in Kazakhstan HE, is linked to clashes between political/educational motivations and Soviet/Western approaches. These findings support my main argument that the specific post-Soviet context should be taken into account in studies of education in the ‘Second World’. These ‘context models’ are influential on how Western standards are implemented in the reality of post-Soviet education.