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Are education systems converging toward a global model of teacher education or do local models tend to predominate in spite of attempts to reform them? How much do global, national, and local cultures shape and condition future teachers’ opportunities to learn to teach? How do these opportunities influence teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge? In this chapter we use data from the IEA’s first study of the effectiveness of pre-service teacher education in order to investigate teacher education policy, program structure, and outcomes. Using multilevel modeling we found that across countries individual characteristics have a similar and powerful influence on what future teachers come to know at the end of their pre-service programs. The effects of teacher education curriculum on future teachers’ mathematics pedagogical content knowledge reaffirm the prevalence of local cultures on the implementation of an increasingly globalized ideal. We conclude that while the provision of teacher education shares many common features in goals and structure across countries, it is strongly influenced by local conditions and norms, and by cultural notions of the knowledge that is considered essential – framing how quality is to be defined and operationalized – when learning to teach.

This chapter will explore the main historical trends of the continuous teacher education development in Russia since the 18th century till present. Continuous teacher education in Russia has been a historically changing problem. Its roots lie in the end of the 18th century but its further formation relates to the emergence and development of open comprehensive schools and the spread of general education and opening the universities throughout the country in the 19th century. At the same time neither in the 18th nor the 19th centuries, teacher education in Russia could not be considered as a system, since its structure did not yet have orderliness, stability, constancy and integrity, even at a minimal level (various educational institutions were abolished and closed, teacher education was just beginning to appear in the regions). Thus, the formation of teacher education as a system fell on the border of the 19th–20th centuries. The topic of continuous teacher education in the USSR received impetus since 1986, when the requirements of scientific and technological revolution determined the task of creating a unified system of continuous education in the Soviet Union. At the same time, the continuous education was not recognised as a guiding principle of the teachers' professional development, although de facto it already existed in the 1920s. The phenomenon of continuity in teacher education, understood as the totality of means and forms of obtaining and deepening teacher education throughout life, existed as early as the beginning of the 20th century.

This chapter examines the initiation of educational change in post-Soviet Russia, using the eight-factor change framework developed by Michael Fullan. Interviews were conducted with 24 key individuals, including members of the Ministry of Education, teacher educators, university researchers, and members of advocacy and school reform organizations. Important primary (government, policy, and school) documents related to the change process of educational transformation were also examined. The format for the interviews involved a common, open-ended unstructured questionnaire, upon which the researchers elaborated with additional probes as the interview unfolded. The interviews ranged from 1–2 hours in length; approximately 50–55 hours of material were recorded. Data analyses involved examination of the transcribed interviews, extensive notes, and documents acquired by the principal researcher. With a specific focus on decentralization reforms, the Russian experience was matched against the initiation stage of Fullan”s framework in order to understand Russia”s transformation as a “change” process. The data show that Fullan”s conceptual framework does clearly have utility for helping us understand events in Russia. However, we propose a revised framework, which is more consistent with the revolutionary rather than the evolutionary transformation and, therefore, better accounts for the dynamic character of dramatic and sudden change typical of Russia and other former Soviet countries.

Secondary professional teacher education (onwards – SPTE) in Russia has gone through many stages, from ups to downs. There have been periods when SPTE was in low demand and associated with poor student success. However, SPTE has been able to meet the socio-economic challenges of the time, take its place in the hierarchy of Russian education and become a competitive and effective system of practice-oriented teacher training.

The chapter is devoted to the subject description of the dynamic process of formation and development of modern SPTE as an educational system. The authors analyse scientific and pedagogical publications and methodological works of Russian scientists and summarise the results on the basis of their analysis. The proposed chapter ‘Secondary Professional Pedagogical Education in Russia’ will consider the development of the modern system of secondary professional teacher education in Russia. Particular emphasis is placed on the continuity of the theory and practice of teacher training, the peculiarities of a person-centred educational environment and the strong continuity of secondary professional and higher teacher education.

Higher education/higher learning is an activity and experience (academic in scope, socializing in character) organized and structured in institutes, funded and regulated by authorities (state/private). It is an activity that helps to mold people who make up society, fostering societal development on the base of intellectual enterprise, scholarly work, and inquiry. We face the challenge of understanding higher education. Our discussion is not only directed toward professional educators, but also urges reconsideration of Russian higher education among the broad spectrum of social processes and developments following the decline of state socialism in Russia.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the outcomes of the financial optimization process launched by the recent reforms in the Russian higher education sector and its impact on access to higher education, its quality and competitiveness within the sector. The study of the economic performance of higher educational institutions includes complex analysis of financial and educational components of their structural dynamics and their impact on their development strategy.

The methods used in the study of the segmentation of the higher education sector involve a combination of theoretical developments in economics and the modeling of the economic behavior of universities on the market for educational services, procedures for the evaluation of transaction costs in the markets with asymmetric information and recent conceptions of the interrelation of factors affecting quality and accessibility of higher education.

In this paper, the economic potential of Russian universities is considered, making use of a segmentation of the higher education sector, based on sampling of state and municipal higher education institutions from different industry groups, depending on their development strategy under changing social and economic conditions. The research data for 2006‐2009 help to define five clusters of the higher educational establishments with different approaches towards public funding and different strategies.

Based on the research data, the paper evaluates the current situation in the Russian higher education sector and some skewed structures of the reforms and outlines some policy implications.

This is the introductory chapter of the book. This chapter explains the background and relevance of the topic of the book – the process of a national higher education reform in the post-Soviet space such as Ukraine until passing the Law about Higher Education in 2014, and the ways in which this story can inform our understanding of some aspects of the Europeanisation in the post-Soviet context. The Bologna reform is, arguably, one of the expressions of Europeanisation in post-Soviet countries that belong to the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). The Bologna Process is an international policy project for the standardisation of higher education structures in the European Higher Education Area. It comprised 29 European countries at the start of the Bologna Process in 1999, and it started incorporating more states later, a lot of which were not part of the EU. Beside the overarching goal to create the EHEA, a number of concrete objectives, called the action lines, were identified, such as the adoption of a common system of credits and cycles of study process, the development of an easily readable diploma supplement issued to graduates, the promotion of student and faculty mobility and the assurance of higher education quality.

This chapter also presents methodological considerations associated with designing the research presented in this book, such as conducting interviews and identifying policy documents – and how thematic analysis was applied to these two types of data. The case of Ukraine is characterised as instrumental because, beside the contribution it makes to how we see the Bologna reform in Ukraine itself, this case study is important for understanding wider Europeanisation issues.

The purpose of this article is to analyze main principles, forms and approaches to education quality evaluation in the process of establishment, development and crucial changes in the state accreditation of educational institutions and study programmes in Russian higher education in the last 20 years.

The major research method used in the paper is the qualitative analysis of legal and statistical documents, research papers and accreditation practices, which impacted the development and transformation of accreditation forms in Russia.

The transformation process of state accreditation during the last 20 years was conditioned by the changes in the state education policy and socio-economic situation. In a short period, under the influence of internal and external factors, Russian higher education has experienced significant changes in the structure of higher education and quality assurance. This resulted in different approaches to accreditation: state and independent, mandatory and voluntary, national and international.

The research outcomes may be applicable in the countries with developing accreditation systems and comparable scope of education.

The study identifies the tendencies in the development of higher education and quality evaluation.

The paper systematizes the tendencies of development in quality assurance and distinguishes specific features and diversity of forms of the quality assurance in one of the largest systems of higher education.