From pedagogy to quality: the Europeanised experience of higher education in post-Soviet Armenia

Abstract

The article reports on a study of everyday university life and the academic life-world of professionals in education management in Armenia, focusing on the impact of Europeanisation on their professional identity construction. It also examines the impact of broader ideologies associated with quality assurance on the higher education provision in the country. The need for European funding, together with pressures for quality enhancement, create a shared sense of obligation to meet the perceived goals of Europeanisation and, in the specific context of Armenia, construct the identity of ‘imitator’ among education managers. These managers also turn away from pedagogy, in the mistaken belief that it is contaminated by the Soviet legacy. Consequently, students experience national higher education as a newly emergent space preoccupied with articulating ‘quality assurance’, rather than an environment supportive of teaching and learning.

Keywords

Education management Europeanisation imitator identity phenomenological sociology quality assurance university life-world

Introduction: Europeanisation and phenomenological enquiry

Countries respond to Europeanisation of higher education in different ways. In reflecting this difference, ‘Europeanisation’ may be theorised in terms of globalisation and major social transformations not exclusively initiated by the European Union (EU), but originating in the wider complex circumstances of modernity (Delanty and Rumford, 2005). One important definition of the concept of ‘higher education Europeanisation’ represents it as a process whereby global agendas are dispersed into the national – in this case, post-socialist – contexts (Silova, 2010). Then again, the idea of Europe and Europeanisation is framed by what Bauman (1987) has called ‘liquid modernity’ thus highlighting the persistent development of global conditions of higher education (Rinne and Ozga, 2011: 66–67). The recognition of the diversity of local and global contexts in which Europeanisation of higher education may be discerned raises interesting questions about the key themes considered relevant to scholarly enquiry and, indeed, to policy development. Empirical research from countries conventionally described as ‘less developed’ offers new insights on education reform. For example, Tadevosyan (2008) emphasised some important aspects of the impact of decentralising school reform on community participation in Armenia, where international donor organisations competed to influence government, each insisting on its own version or scheme of change. In South Africa, outcomes-based education, in the analysis by Spreen (2004), was seen as a case of ‘indigenisation’ of ‘best-practice’ in education policy, a perspective denied by local policy actors who sought to appease critics by claiming that it was designed in place (Steiner-Khamsi, 2013: 25). Attention to the distinctive national environments and specific higher education realities that individual actors create and experience in universities highlights the need for the exploration of Europeanisation through situation-based local higher education sociological research; that is, for research within the phenomenological tradition.

Phenomenological sociology offers a methodological foundation for conceptualisation of higher education at both the institutional and the personal levels. A phenomenological worldview may enable researchers to undertake pluralistic, interpretative and open-ended explorations of particular, local cases of Europeanisation to potentially unlock the ‘liquidity’ of contemporary higher educational reality. Such an approach allows for the capturing of nation-specific and contextualised differences that are an important aspect of Europeanisation. As Clark (1983) noted, when referring to the ‘givenness’ of things, any academy is a separate and differentiated (though contextualised) world with specific authorities, particular teaching and learning philosophies, research traditions, values and norms. This has an obvious impact on how the process of Europeanisation progresses through local space and time.

Higher education Europeanisation, understood as a process of negotiation, discussion and attraction (Lawn and Grek, 2012) rather than formal regulation, is open to study through phenomenological approaches. In a sense, European education policy, as enacted and experienced locally, promotes the construction of European educational space within a complex interplay of relations, data and actors that have their own experiences of sets of benchmarks, standards, statistics and modes of managerial activities. Many individual actors co-construct the European education space through their sense of identities, roles, viewpoints and ideologies and the ‘imaginary’ of Europe (Nóvoa and Lawn, 2002). Lawn and Normand (2015: 6) noted that European studies are focused on institutions and groups but do not often consider the relationships between individuals and their environment. In this respect, the university life-world, as indicative of the envisioned, imagined or understood European educational space, frequently remains unaddressed.

The ways in which individual researchers, teachers and/or managers express their interests and socially legitimate aspects of the ‘global’, the ‘European’ and the ‘local’ (Ozga et al., 2011: 6) within their university departmental lives are important in the understanding of higher education Europeanisation. The phenomenon exists in a dense web of microclimates, circles and layers of experiences. Phenomenology produces insights into the orders of being within European higher educational realities, offering an alternative to formal statements of reconstruction. Phenomenology may well enrich the understanding of everyday university life, with a focus on Europeanisation, and it also allows for a more in-depth study of associated quality assurance and management practices. Quality assurance is embodied in education management models (Segerholm, 2012) and this makes it a key dimension for exploring Europeanisation in higher education.

Identity, seen as a conceptual frame rather than a separate element (Green, 2005), here in phenomenological terms, refers to the forms of attachment of the individual professionals to academic communities and institutional frameworks that originate from continual internalisation and externalisation, importation and exportation of subjectively and objectively constructed social realities (Berger and Luckmann, 2011). Institutional frameworks are understood as dynamic social constructs linked to Europeanisation and explored through university departmental aims and objectives, the managerial atmosphere as experienced by academic staff, contexts for the design of the curricula, quality assurance policies and procedures in place, teaching and research and, most importantly, the ‘significant othering’ (Mead, 1934). Taking Mead’s paradigm of socialisation and applying it to the problem of institutionalisation, Berger and Luckmann (2011) have highlighted that the origins of any institutional order lie in the typification of one’s own (e.g. the ‘local’ higher educational) and others’ (e.g. the perceived ‘European’) performances. Attribution of meaning to a post-socialist higher education is based on Europe as a collective ‘other’ that signifies local and global recognition. In abandoning the socialist past and embracing the logic of Western modernity for ‘salvation’, post-socialist schools and societies entered the worlds of supplementary meanings – tensions between commonalities/differences and of educational mutation (Silova, 2010: 6–9). In this respect, Armenian higher education represents a typical case. Henceforward, the term ‘Europeanisation’ should be understood as ‘perceived Europeanisation’. This qualifier indicates acceptance of the fact that national interpretations of higher educational reform are distinctive and do not sit neatly with a generic concept of Europeanisation. In addition, when the funding schemes (both EU and non-EU) directed at reform generate a discursive power, the problematic character of the universal understanding of ‘Europeanisation’ increases. In so doing, ‘Europeanisation’ becomes closer to ‘globalisation’, ‘neoliberalism’ and ‘liquid modernity’; that is, signifying something rather distant from synchronisation of a national educational (and higher educational) reform agenda.

In the remainder of the paper, following some background discussion of the context of Armenia, the day-to-day university practices and actual lived experiences of education managers are drawn upon in order to illustrate how the idea of Europeanisation became a vehicle for mobilising managerial authority in this post-Soviet country. The paper reports the results of a phenomenological sociological study of the structures of consciousness of individual experiences (Polkinghorne, 1989: 41–60) constituting the reality of recently established education management departments (and hence the communities of education managers) in Armenian state universities. It focuses on the impact of some broad institutional frameworks (i.e. government policy, Europeanisation, quality assurance and management) on professional identity construction among current education managers, and also of those in training. In doing this, it seeks to offer insights into the embodied, situational, perceived order of Europeanisation, opening up taken-for-granted dimensions of higher education reform in a developing post-Soviet country context.

It is argued that institutional ‘discursive landscapes of power’ linked to Europeanisation infuse the national space with certain cultural, social and national meanings (Silova, 2002: 196) resulting in the post hoc exclusion of pedagogy from Armenian higher education. Instead, novel ‘terms’ of education management and quality assurance were articulated that construct new forms of identity with little reflection about teaching and learning. In using the term ‘pedagogy’ I emphasise a phenomenon that normally changed its connotation after the fall of the Soviet regime, but did not regain a new discursive value under the pressure of perceived Europeanisation of higher education in Armenia.

The aim of the paper is thus to shed light on this issue and explicate the process of reconstruction of higher educational managerial identity in the country. The main findings of the research are discussed in relation to three major themes: (i) the lens of management; (ii) the exclusion of pedagogy; and (iii) preoccupation with quality assurance.

The research

Four departments of education management at state Armenian universities were studied and the results are presented in this paper. These departments were identified as communities knowledgeable about the Europeanisation of higher education in the country and, indeed, as active contributors to this process – this was how they were officially described (see, for example, ASUE, 2012; MAHATMA, 2012; UNESCO, 1995–2010; YSU, 2015; YSULSS, 2011). In addition to interview data, the paper draws on a documentary analysis. The materials studied were gathered during the interviewing period to fill the gaps in understanding of the phenomena under research. The webpages of the departments were examined in detail.

Following an accepted tradition of phenomenological studies – that is, reliance predominantly on interview data (Creswell, 2013: 36) – three sets of interviews were undertaken: (a) five interviews with international experts; (b) 12 in-depth interviews with academic staff; and (c) 17 semi-structured interviews with the students of the four departments.

The expert interview data were used only in a limited fashion, to set the stage for further research and help operationalise key concepts. Snowball sampling (Henry, 2009: 77–106) was used to identify the experts; these experts were chosen on the basis of their areas of expertise (higher education in the post-socialist area and Europeanisation of higher education in the accession countries) and availability. Two of the experts were specialists in pedagogy, three of them were sociologists of higher education. All of the experts were competent in the comparative analysis of educational reforms and reflected upon the post-socialist developments. The experts had years of experience of working in educational departments across countries. Interviewing was halted upon the receipt of rich initial data from the five international experts, each of whom was approached once.

The ‘traveller metaphor’ within the constructivist research model describes well the attitude towards the data obtained through the in-depth interviews with the academic staff. The interviews were to provide access to the meanings that the staff attributed to their own perceptions and accordingly constructed experiences of Europeanisation and to their social worlds. ‘Travelling’ through emergent conversation, the interviewees were encouraged to develop their insights on the topics of interest and be self-reflective, so that they could express their professional identity and the related impact of institutional frameworks (Schultze and Avital, 2011: 4; Legard and Keegan, 2003: 139; Kvale, 2007). The information provided by the academic staff representatives was put into the context of data received from the experts. Any documents deemed as important, based on the interview data (or referenced to by the interviewees), were studied.

Three academic staff representatives were selected from four state departments of education management. The heads of the departments and two academic staff representatives were recruited (maintaining a gender balance) based on their teaching experiences: Soviet and post-Soviet. Thus, Soviet teaching experience was regarded as a major criterion in the recruitment of the interview participants. Overall, five academic staff members had gained experience of teaching since Soviet times. It was difficult to recruit these interviewees because the four departments were mostly populated by younger faculty members if the heads of the departments were excluded. In sum, 12 interviews (respondents were approached 32 times) were conducted: each interviewee was approached up to five times, dependent upon data saturation.

Drawing on the fact that semi-structured interviews allow for a range of research goals (Galleta, 2013: 45–72), the protocol for interviews with students was developed with a reliance on the data previously obtained (from the document analysis, the academic staff members and the experts). All students of the departments who were in the process of writing their graduate thesis in higher education management were approached. Only two students from one of the departments were interviewed, because the head of the department limited access to the remaining students. In total, 17 students out of a possible 25 interviewees agreed to participate. Refusals to participate were mostly attributed to being busy either at the workplace or with household duties. The students expressed themselves independently and reflected on their learning experiences and further professional expectations.

All interviews were transcribed verbatim. Coding of the data was done following guidelines by Moustakas (1994) and Tesch (1990: 92–93) in reaching the last stage of interpretation of meaningful structures. Thereafter, achieving a holistic meaning from the all-encompassing data was realised through reading and re-reading of the entire dataset. ‘Meaning units’ were identified and distinguishable moments in the data regarding the researched perceptions and experiences were coded. The content of each meaning unit was re-stated into a more professional language through clustering together of the similar-meaning units. Descriptive statements at a ‘specific level’, including the specifics and concreteness of the experiences in contrast to general descriptions, were produced. All specific descriptions were compared, the particulars were omitted, and the ‘trans-situational’ construction of the researched phenomena was highlighted so that the themes for discussion emerged.

Results and discussion

The lens of management

In the Armenian context, the fundamental structure of higher education reform was characterised through the lens of management (and not through the philosophy or sociology of education, education as a multidisciplinary domain and/or an applied science, nor even through research). The international experts who were interviewed saw strong economic drivers steering higher education globalisation, and attributed an ideological element to the rise of managerial discourses in local contexts. The completed document analysis and interview data supported the experts’ view.

In 2005, Armenia joined the Bologna process, officially emphasising the importance of being a part of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). The first education management department in a state Armenian university was established in the same year.

Representatives of the Armenian educational institutions, including the Ministry of Education and Science, as well as the individuals experiencing daily academic life in the universities, all found themselves redefining their roles and reconstructing their identities through the conscious process of re-conceptualisation of higher education (Heyneman, 2010). In the past, Soviet administrative bodies had little to do with the institutional management of the universities: academic co-existence was centrally defined, planned and controlled by governmental bodies (Karakhaknyan, 2011).

In the case of Armenia, in relation to the ideological dimension of higher educational reform, the dissolution of the Soviet Union created a space where Europe could be seen as offering possibilities for the modification of the higher education management system (Karakhanyan, 2011: 17). Indeed, lived experience does not designate a subjective or mental state, but frequently, the condition of being in relation to the ‘other’ as objectifying and as also being deprived of one’s own sense of agency and subjectivity (van Manen, 1997: 347). Europe in this case represented a powerful or a ‘significant other’ (Mead, 1934), an ‘imaginary’ force (Castoriadis, 1987) for Armenian higher education, where definitions of reality became attached to acceptable perceived European power, authority and interests and hence took on ideological dimensions.

As characterised in the official websites (ASUE, 2012; MAHATMA, 2012; UNESCO, 1995–2010; YSU, 2015; YSULSS, 2011), three of the four academic departments of education management (all operating at graduate level) studied were established at state universities as programme-based entities, funded by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and in the framework of the EU Trans European Mobility Program for University Studies (TEMPUS) projects.

As described by the academic staff representatives whom I interviewed, the first education management department was planned in a proposal to UNESCO. As noted by one of those interviewed (Academic No. 3; 16 April 2015), ‘the department was initially a draft proposal to a donor organisation’. In 2003, when centralised administrative traditions still persisted in Armenian universities, a few representatives of the country’s Ministry of Education and Science were engaged in the pioneering Europeanisation and reform projects of the government. This small group of people wrote the proposal for a UNESCO chair, met with the UNESCO representatives in Paris, and the application proposing the establishment of the department was submitted in 2005.¹ The objectives for this department at the National Institute of Education (UNESCO, 1995–2010) were defined as follows: (a) to promote an integrated system of research, training, information and documentation in education management and planning; and (b) to serve as a means of facilitating collaboration between high-level, internationally recognised researchers and teaching staff of the institute and other institutions in Armenia and Europe.

Because the National Institute of Education was engaged exclusively in teacher training and this first department needed a different higher educational environment, in 2007 it was moved to Yerevan State Linguistic University (later renamed as Yerevan State University of Languages and Social Sciences after Brusov, YSULSS). The university already had experience of having a UNESCO chair in political and European science, as well as staff competent in the English language, which was very important regarding collaboration with international organisations. After approximately two years, for no apparent reason the department was divided into two parts, one of which remained at YSULSS while the other was re-established at the Armenian State University of Economics (ASUE).

As stated on its website, the vision of the department, moved from the National Institute of Education to the YSULSS, was as follows:

Emphasising the significance of higher education in the process of globalisation and RA [Republic of Armenia] educational reforms, as well as reckoning with the market liberalisation and competitive environment in the educational sector, the chair endeavours to build a structure of competitive education quality assurance in compliance with international standards. (YSULSS, 2011)

The department aimed at the enhancement of the implementation of three-level education (graduate, undergraduate and post-graduate) in public administration, with a minor in education management. The mission was to contribute to the reform of Armenian higher education with an emphasis on the development of internationally competitive educational programmes and through networking with other UNESCO chairs worldwide.

The UNESCO chair at ASUE started its activities in 2009–2010 on the basis of a cooperation agreement with the National Institute of Education. According to the information provided on the university’s website (ASUE, 2012), the department cooperated with the Open Society Foundation (OSF) – Armenia and the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) in developing its educational programmes. The department acted as a partner organisation in the framework of a TEMPUS project developing international cooperation with several European universities.

Yerevan State University (YSU, 2015), Faculty of Philology, Department of Pedagogy, launched a graduate-level programme in higher education management from 2006 without external funding, albeit with the active participation of senior management staff of the institution. The specification of the programme as ‘higher education management’ made the department distinctive in terms of mentioning higher learning in the qualification issued.

A department providing specialisation in education management was also established at the State Pedagogical University in 2012, in the framework of a TEMPUS project called ‘Mahatma; master in higher education management: developing leaders for managing educational transformation’. The homepage of the official website of the project (see MAHATMA, 2012) begins with the words of Mahatma Ghandi expressing the uniqueness of leadership in education. The wider objective of the project was to promote transformation of higher education management in Armenia and Georgia through the introduction of a new graduate-level programme and professional development courses. The principal outputs of the project were to be the enhancement of higher education management through the training of educational leaders able to handle the complexities of change, and promotion of the integration of innovative teaching, learning and higher education management methods. The programme aimed at alignment with and implementation of the Bologna process, informing curriculum development with an emphasis on quality assurance.

Notably, all of the departments accentuated key concepts of management, leadership and internationalisation, with no connection/reference to pedagogy, or to ‘innovative’ teaching and learning supposedly integral to the new modes of management.

Interviewer:

Can you please describe the job you would like to have in the future?

Student:

A managerial one.

Interviewer:

Can you please describe this job in more detail?

Student:

No [laughter].

This extract from a semi-structured interview with a student (Student No. 6, 20 May 2015) illustrates the intersubjective power of the word ‘management’ that attracted the students to apply to the four departments in the study. As the research revealed, the students were encouraged to apply predominately by their families, friends and other university faculty staff who saw the value of managerial work and the route it offered to leadership roles in higher education.

Being considered as avenues of upward mobility, the departments mostly attracted students from the same university setting but who had previously been enrolled in less prestigious branches: for example philology and linguistics, tourism, as well as pedagogy. In the exceptional case of the economics university (ASUE), those students unable to survive the competition of entering the graduate-level management faculty applied to the department of education management. For the economics students this route was regarded as downward mobility because ‘management’ without ‘education’ was seen as more prestigious.

Frequently, the alumni of the departments encouraged their undergraduate friends from the same university to apply for education management, describing it as ‘innovative’, ‘progressive’ and ‘having its say’ within the universities. An important factor here was the role model presented by the leading management staff of the universities. In addition, the visiting ‘prestigious’ academic staff from the World Bank, Armenian National Quality Assurance Agency (ANQA), the Ministry of Education and Science, embassies and other international organisations were also influential.

Academic staff from other university faculties played a vital role in influencing the students’ choices. Pointing to the fact that the departments were based on ‘international’ or EU-funded programmes and were piloting projects in higher education reformation, they directed students to the departments for their graduate studies. The engagement of the departments in international programmes (and funding schemes) as a route to better pay and to respect not only in the national, but also international, contexts were fundamental motivators for the majority of students in applying to the departments.

Students saw managers as ‘above’ the teachers, as observers of the teaching process and creators of preconditions for smooth realisation of the process. They expressed the strong belief that an education manager must be a competent strategic planner. They perceived the higher learning environment through the prism of their own department as exemplary, regarding an education manager as an author of policies (with strong linguistic and legal skills) who can direct the development of the universities towards progress. They considered policy development as a privilege of managers.

The academic staff representatives who were interviewed all had backgrounds in social sciences and humanities, and came to the departments of education management from the fields of philosophy, economics and/or management, political science, oriental studies, psychology and linguistics, and also pedagogy. All of those interviewed became interested in education from the standpoint of their initial profession. It was apparent that the professional background and work experience of the departmental staff influenced how they defined education and why had entered the field. Interestingly, all of the staff members had gained experience of working in/with the non-governmental sector, the government, or in the university management infrastructures, and came to see the importance of education from a vocational point of view. Notably, only two interviewees who had come from pedagogy to education management regarded themselves as advanced teachers who could progress to ‘management levels’. They indicated that the management level was higher and more advanced than the teaching level.

Three of the four heads of the departments (all of whom were also teaching in these departments) had received training in education management in the United States (US) in the initial stages of their career. The US school of education management was understood as having shaped their professional preferences. The departmental staff saw a fundamental national need for a new type of professional education manager in national university settings.

Exclusion of pedagogy

According to the international experts’ views, the transition from Soviet to post-Soviet and further to Europeanised higher education was characterised by two basic trends. First, there was no system-wide agreed definition of the knowledge to be transmitted in higher education in general terms: how the reform of the curricula, teaching methods and research should happen, and towards which national qualification framework (still underdeveloped in a post-Soviet context). This illustrates the lack of pedagogical reflection, namely in the definition of what might be regarded as ‘old’ and ‘new’ methods and how the shifts in teaching and learning might reflect the changes. Second, there was no reference in current discussions to the strengths of the egalitarian socialist educational tradition, which, according to the experts, was worth preserving. Taking the example of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) countries, one of the experts (Expert No. 5, 24 March 2015) pointed out that the strengths of the socialist system of higher learning were damaged by the speed of transition towards orientation to Europe.

Based on the expert’s opinion, I argue here that the speed of Armenia-specific transitions and the low levels of associated self-reflection affected the pedagogical traditions of the state universities of the country. Indeed, the concept of ‘pedagogy’ has had a specific historical context in the case of the former Soviet republics, including Armenia. Soviet pedagogy was based on central administration and ‘authoritarianism’ (Cramer and Browne, 1965: 453). Teaching was generally teacher-centred and learning was largely based on memorisation (Keshishian, 2013: 254). The views of Lev Vygotski, who stressed the role of the teacher and the society in learning and development, were not emphasised in practice because Soviet education had its clear ideological limitations (Keshishian, 2013). However, the teachers valued pedagogy to a certain extent (whether at the abstract theoretical level or in practice), regarding it as the core of any educational institution. Leaving aside the losses, for the purposes of this discussion, the gains of Soviet education were accomplished particularly through a pedagogical approach (Baker, 2011). Here, what is important is not the quality and the content of this approach but, rather, the very fact that pedagogy was valued. Arguably, pedagogy as a phenomenon lost its discursive power under the pressure of perceived Europeanisation and its association with ‘Soviet education’. The term ‘pedagogy’ mistakenly gained a negative undertone despite its necessity (beyond the Soviet reality) for any educational institution. In fact, pedagogy was the only element of social science that developed strongly in the Soviet Union. A new attitude towards research emerged, demonstrating an ongoing move from ideology-based to research-based social science (see Isaakyan, 2006 on the steering of education research in post-Soviet Russia). The departments of international relations, sociology, social work and public administration, as well as those of education management, were established after the country became independent in 1991. By 2010, the four departments of education management (ASUE, 2012; UNESCO, 1995–2010; YSU, 2015; YSULSS, 2011) in the state universities of Armenia had already been established, receiving support and funding from international organisations.

Meanwhile, the state pedagogical university had been in existence since Soviet times (Ministry of Education and Science of the Republic of Armenia, n.d.). An artificial distinction originating from the institutional/organisational separation between education management and pedagogy was created. The departments of education management were established and presented themselves as advocates for the Europeanisation of higher education. The academics working in these departments, and their students, identified themselves as pioneers in the construction of a new culture of Armenian higher learning beyond the traditional pedagogical ideology of Soviet education. Pedagogy, as a consequence, came to be viewed as a Soviet phenomenon. Thus, an anti-pedagogical managerial identity was constructed, mistakenly emphasising Europeanisation as inherently antagonistic to pedagogical principles and situating the education manager with a reform agenda in opposition to historically-constructed formations of teachers and teaching. Management of higher education came to be seen as conflicting with basic concerns for teaching and learning. This resulted in difficulties in creating manager–teacher collaboration, which in turn prevented developments aimed at improving quality. Processes associated with Europeanisation – for example, the need for accreditation based on institutional quality assurance capacity – became identified as a means for justifying managerial authority, but more by giving the appearance of reform than through genuine development. In turn, the education managers adopted ‘imitator’ identities that displayed their willingness to change and ‘modernise’ in line with European directives and advice. Of course, a global framework also supports such identification. As Caplow and McGee (1958) and others (Slaughter and Leslie, 1997; Slaughter, 2004; Marginson, 2006), in line with the interviewed experts, have suggested, universities situate themselves in a global marketplace due to external globalising pressures. Despite the desire to protect academic freedom, which has gained ground in post-Soviet systems (Altbach, 2001: 205), academics are drawn into identification with neo-liberal agendas of competition and positioning (Gornitzka and Larsen, 2004; Darryl, 2014). It is perhaps not surprising that education managers generally position themselves in a more privileged locus than do the university teachers, taking into account the global status of the ‘management’ profession (Keller, 1983; Rhoades and Sporn, 2002) as well as the specific context of the Armenian higher education. That is to say, the rise of the professional, the education manager, followed from the supremacy of the logic of the marketplace rather than from Europeanisation reforms per se. Meanwhile, the academics who prioritised teaching (and who might also be engaged in research activities), but were not involved in the university managerial work, were regarded as ‘teachers’ in the case of Armenia and are referred to as such in this article.

According to an expert, who had worked with the post-Soviet higher education representatives,

…one fundamental solution to problems would be the strong further intellectualisation of teaching with an emphasis on producing students who can think, reason, argue and debate. (Expert No. 1, 17 February 2015)

Conversely, the Armenian higher education system has become preoccupied with management infrastructure and has neglected teaching. As noted by the interviewed experts who experience and research education reform, teaching has to be ‘the bread and butter’ of every department of education regardless of which specialisation it offers. With regard to the development of education-related qualifications in Armenia, reference was made to the network of UNESCO chairs in official pronouncements. However, the academic staff who were interviewed stated explicitly that there was no networking even between the same departments of the same country (Armenia). The only advantage gained by the departments according to the staff was the UNESCO brand name. At the same time, staff seemed persuaded that Armenian higher education needed education management professionals and not pedagogues. As one academic staff member commented:

To be honest, I do not understand what pedagogy is, it is the expression of the Prussian model that came from two hundred years ago and even if we talk about teacher training I am against a pedagogical university in Armenia. (Academic No. 11, 20 May 2015)

The academic staff described Soviet education in negative terms as a ‘working phantom’, something that did not exist but which negatively affected the present. As this staff member stated it, ‘It’s like when a person has lost a hand, but it still feels as if it is there’ (Academic No. 9, 5 March 2015). The interview data suggest that academic staff felt that elements of the Soviet past (including pedagogy) remained present in the universities; for example, they felt that the older generation maintained the old teaching methods and that these teachers had to be excluded from the ‘modern’ departments of education management. The departments, they said, needed to prepare change-makers, professionals who would drive education reform. As one of the interviewees stated it:

We were behind the Iron Curtain, then we gained independence forced to build a nation on the ruins of the Soviet regime recalling the pre-Soviet national identity and looking forward to international developments and to a better educational future in Europe. (Academic No. 4, 3 April 2015)

However, staff also said that few things had actually changed in the classrooms. Funding became the major concern in order to maintain positions at the state universities and to assure the further existence of the departments. In theory the ideology of student-centred teaching and learning was universally accepted, but its application was hard to realise with limited human, financial and infrastructural resources and – clearly – with the presence of tension between pedagogy (negatively perceived as Soviet) and education management (perceived as European).

Of course, some aspects of the Western and US models of higher education were deemed worthy – especially higher salaries in the context of low salaries in Armenia – but pedagogy was evidently given a negative status and was not re-energised, leaving teaching and learning out of the scope of managerial experience. This caused the individuals in different fields of education to embrace the idea of management and to believe that, in the context of higher education Europeanisation in Armenia, it was the education manager and not the teaching professional who knew how to assure quality.

The pursuit of modernisation, as manifested in attempted internationalisation, in the growth of strategic planning, in enhanced mobility, in a preoccupation with capacity development, and in strengthened relations between universities and the market through acquisition of funds, seemed to the interviewed academic staff to suggest that the old order was banished, and that the last Soviet teacher would soon be gone from the higher education system. However, Soviet education constituted a very important part of Armenian higher educational history, it continues to be important as a subject for discussion and remains important as influential history in phenomenological sense.

In turn, the interviewed students expressed pride in the fact that there were no ‘old fashioned’ and Soviet-style lecturers in their departments. They considered writing a strategic plan a theoretical practice and did not differentiate between academic and corporate research, being more familiar with the latter. Seven students, also referring to their course mates, said that they would be happy to have lengthy internships (from six months to a year) rather than receive a graduate degree in two years, but because there were no such opportunities, they were studying for a degree. All of the students were willing to take a break before deciding on further studies, first seeking practical jobs. Those rare students expressing interest in further studies were linked with education abroad and needed long-term planning and improvement in English language skills. The students defined management as a technical means towards achievement of quality in education, seeing themselves as advocates of better quality in higher education and aiming for the implementation of the Bologna principles as future managers. They observed close links between education management and quality assurance: in contrast, the students saw no links between education management and pedagogy. Only one student out of 17 specifically viewed pedagogy as a philosophy for education management. Most often, education managers were seen as having higher positions and more authority to initiate systematic changes than teachers.

The lack of critical reflection was obvious in expressions of students’ attitudes towards Europeanisation and Bologna. Like the teaching staff of the departments, they expressed the view that a change in generations was needed in the Armenian higher learning environment in order to drive the Bologna process. In summary, the students’ perceptions of the basic advantage of Bologna were very instrumentally focused on academic mobility; there was less reflection on the content of the process. Lacking comparative knowledge and experience of how Bologna is, or is not, implemented in different countries, and what lessons were learnt, the students expressed strongly localised, grounded views.

The image of an ‘old lecturer’ with undeniable authority was highlighted as one of the most important symbols of Soviet times. Students did not exhibit academic knowledge about the Soviet past and did not reflect on the Soviet system, providing a very descriptive rather than conceptualised portrayal of the past and ignoring (just as the academics did) the fact that many contemporary senior management staff of the universities (who were current role models) had lived and worked in that regime.

Preoccupation with quality assurance

Thus, the four departments of education management in Armenia found themselves committed to the preparation of managers and separated (together with their students) from the community of pedagogues, hence emphasising the gap between the realities of the managers and the teachers. As one interviewed expert noted:

Europeanisation is important as an institutional framework in which individual practitioners in education still think, argue and debate, but when this framework becomes an ‘imaginary’ master in the construction of professional identities, the individuals stop thinking, ticking boxes becomes a form of an identity. (Expert No. 3, 21 February 2015)

Interestingly, three of the four heads of department of education management in the Armenian state universities were also the quality assurance representatives of their universities: they occupied the position of the head of the department and of the university quality assurance officer simultaneously. This had an influence on the development of a quality assurance discourse among the departmental staff and, as a consequence, among the students. Other teaching staff in all four departments represented personnel actively engaged in different educational projects or occupying leading administrative positions in the university infrastructures where the departments were located. The departments became centres for the development of university quality assurance and for preparing students as specialists to fulfil associated functions. This contributed to the development of practical knowledge within the departments that lacked strong theoretical bases and traditions in education as a social science.

Academic staff expressed strong affiliation with the university setting. The senior management of the universities was involved in teaching in the departments. Departments did not collaborate with one another and the heads of the departments positioned those as competitors in attracting students. Two of the teaching staff representatives expressed the view that it was wrong to have the departments within universities: their academic autonomy was endangered, it was felt. These staff members described education management departments not as academic but more as administrative entities which, in their words, should be established independently of universities in order to provide internship opportunities for those who wished to be professional education managers. Moreover, the education managers considered the pedagogical university as a threat to higher education quality assurance despite the fact that this university had established an education management department just as other state universities had done. There was a belief among the academic staff representatives that if there were no good education managers in the country, no high quality teaching and learning would be possible in the context of Europeanisation. To a certain extent education was seen as something broader than pedagogy; the perception of the academic staff representatives of pedagogy as an impediment to quality assurance represented a legitimate and institutionalised restriction – in other words, a social construct – of what ‘pedagogy’ is: one that was shaped by the perceived Soviet past. Departments started to focus on the preparation of applications to a variety of funding schemes. The funding from UNESCO ended in 2014, funding from the TEMPUS projects was about to end (in 2016), some funding was received from the World Bank, the European Union, State Committee of Science, and different embassies in Armenia. Funds were directed to meeting immediate financial needs rather than achievement of the documented or proposed aims in various strategy documents (related to internationalisation, mobility, teaching and learning quality assurance, curriculum development and evaluation). The ‘translation’ of ‘best cases’ in the Armenian context, prioritisation of quality assurance areas, policy-usefulness, modernisation of the curricula, and enhancement of evaluation methodologies and quality assessment were accentuated. However, the multiple points of view on Europeanisation possibilities led to semantic confusions and intentions to hide the lack of real changes in quality, because the reforms were not grounded in teaching and learning, as well as located in the wider post-Soviet cultural context of the society. As one of the academics (Academic No. 5, 17 May 2015) commented, ‘Half of what is reported to the EU is untrue, being a consequence of manipulated data on success of programmes’. All of the staff members pointed out that in order to preserve material resources departmental staff were ‘visiting’ and not employed full-time. Under such conditions it was impossible to create a school and established research traditions in education management. The pursuit of varied funding schemes led the departments towards ‘…research with no research traditions and to the study of everything that could bring extra money’, as characterised by one of the interviewees (Academic No. 7, 13 April 2015). With no secure research capacity in a country where Marxist–Leninist ideology had long been a force shaping research, the staff saw the departments of education management as insecure, in search of funding to survive, in a struggle for their existence. As one of the staff members (Academic No. 9, 25 March 2015) observed, ‘research based change is an imitation and the whole education system is not yet used to research-led decision-making and management’. Indeed, academic staff expressed the view that the entire arena of education was undergoing standardisation which was leading towards disaster. Europeanisation in this context came to mean (a) aims and objectives that had to be defined in the application forms; and (b) a hidden platform for funding. As a result, and what is of importance as a consequence, the contradiction between the requirement to meet the pre-set goals of standardised Europeanising practice, defined externally with no reference to actual problems, and the ‘desire’ for funding led to the construction among academic staff of what I call the ‘identity of an imitator’. In the case of the research participants, drawing on Mead’s conception of the self (Mead, 1934), I express my findings thus: their ‘me’ as an accrued understanding of Europe – a significant and generalised other – has created a distance from their ‘I’ and the ‘I’ that continues to cope with a national environment which very frequently sets up contradictions to the desirable Europeanised context. The basic contradiction between their ‘I’, as knowing the actually experienced complex reality, and their ‘me’, as knowing what is appropriate within the scope of a politically legitimised and desirable Europeanising condition, has led to what I call ‘imitation’. The imitator identity came into play because, as Mead noted,

Identification takes place in the social process out of which mind arises. It is the process in which the individual addresses himself and thus becomes an object to himself. (Mead, 1934: 187)

Imitation operates where there is a lack of established ways of acting (a very common phenomenon in the experience of the interviewed academics and students) which opens up both the possibility and necessity of imitation and which establishes the basis for taking the attitude of the other/the ‘Europe’ (Burke and Skowronski, 2013: 146). Phenomenologically speaking, the existence of an undesirably and unavoidably constructed objective reality, full of controversies and transitional difficulties, brought to the fore their lack of knowledge on the ways of acting/managing.

Furthermore, approaching the concept of ‘imitation’ through the theory of educational policy borrowing highlights the newly constructed patterns of identities. This shows how local discursive and meaning-making contexts are re-contextualised or de-contextualised (as in case of pedagogy). ‘Educational borrowing’ is evident in most post-socialist countries where they voluntarily adopted international educational models and practices (Tampayeva, 2015: 75; Silova, 2004; Steiner-Khamsi, 2012) and, as argued in this paper, exhibited European managerial identities (or those perceived as such) through imitation as displayed by those academic community representatives concerned about educational issues in Armenia. In this respect the necessity of recognising the dynamic interaction between international pressures for Westernisation, as related to their ‘me’, and the constraints imposed by Soviet legacies, as related to their ‘I’, becomes critical in the context of the emergent discursive power of Western models (Silova, 2002). In the case of Armenia, these models were embedded in the managerial and quality-assuring identities. The Armenian case thus supports Silova’s (2004: 76) conclusion that, ‘educational borrowing is not necessarily imposed, but can be used by the local agency as a mechanism for meeting its own needs’, – resonating within the ‘I–me’ scheme of identity construction. Thus the local agent is not a ‘helpless victim’ here, but an ‘active imitator’ in the reshaping of local interests through the manipulation of global forces feeding the discursive power of management against pedagogy. The issue becomes even sharper when Armenia’s status as a donor-dependent country (Steiner-Khamsi, 2008: 247–284) in the field of higher education is considered. In fact, reliance on and imitation of the ‘significant other’ of Europe developed in parallel with understanding and experience of the contradictions of Armenian higher educational reality. Quality assessment practices were modified to meet policy requirements, yet the validity of the assessment process itself remained questionable due to the lack of competent researchers and insufficiently established research ethical practice. Quality assurance of education was advocated as a means for Europeanisation, while the main concern of the universities was not quality enhancement, but gaining accreditation.

Operating in the framework of project-based or project-led (UNESCO, TEMPUS, etc.) activities, the education management departments encouraged the academic staff representatives, including those who initiated their establishment, to think about quality assurance as related more to higher education management than to issues of pedagogy. This draws attention to the status of the term ‘pedagogy’ in Europeanisation-related international policy documents and guidelines to reform, a topic I cannot explore here, but one that merits further research.

The developments underlying new manager–teacher relations were ignored by the Armenian education managers and pedagogical issues were not addressed. The process of imitation of Western systems of quality assurance with new (to Armenia) modes of organisational management led to a further imitation process, and so on, resulting in the establishment of four departments of education management with very similar ambitions for funding and competing against each other.

The need to be seen as modern and European has led to the development of a chain of imitations of established, Western quality assurance practices and has supported the development of an imitator identity among education managers, which fixed their attention on the future and denied the past, while standardising and bureaucratising teaching. This disposition was expressed in the way the departments socialised students, i.e. in developing the academic identity of managers-in-formation or future education managers. All the students conceptualised higher education with reference to the specific Armenian context and to its discourse of quality assurance. The students were happy to advise their friends to apply to the departments. Equally, they wanted changes in the curriculum, seeing several courses (including pedagogy) as inefficient and a ‘waste of time’. In addition, and ironically, the students also mentioned that the teaching staff of their departments were too busy and engaged in internationally funded projects, paying less attention to them and to teaching.

The students were more oriented towards practical managerial and non-academic work in higher education. They felt that achieving a graduate degree in education management was sufficient for engagement in higher education quality assurance reform in Armenia. Some of the students thought that a sensible combination of theory and practice was important, although practice was valued more. The students frequently referred to those teaching staff who were from the field of higher education quality assurance as role models.

Conclusions

The case of Armenia discussed here clearly illustrates a contextualised ‘crisis of higher education Europeanisation’. The emergent and developing lens of management, the exclusion of pedagogy and the preoccupation with quality assurance in the post-Soviet country all illustrate the uniqueness of how the phenomenon of ‘Europeanisation’ is perceived in a local national higher educational context. While various funding schemes gain discursive power, the gap between the ‘I’ and the ‘me’ of education managers of the country is deepening and issues of reform become critical. This finding also demonstrates the necessity of a contextualised approach to the Europeanisation of higher education. Specific factors affect how educational borrowing is taken up by the local agency to meet its own needs, as evident in the construction of imitator identities in the case of Armenia.

The research shows that the organisational affiliation of the heads of the education management departments in the present study, as well as the teaching staff, including the senior representatives of university management, influenced how the image of an education manager was constructed within the departmental experience and among the students. The academic and practice-based background of the teaching staff, mainly managerial, influenced the conceptualisation of education and the role the academics and the students might attribute to themselves in higher education. Three of the four heads of departments received career training in schools of education management in the USA and this contributed to distancing the departments from a pedagogical conceptualisation of education, putting emphasis on managerial activities.

The perceived European reformation paradigm constructed the identity of a non-Soviet generation among the younger teaching staff who had no teaching experience from Soviet times, and among the students who saw themselves as free from the impact of the Soviet legacy. At the same time, the internalisation of the modernising paradigm resulted in exclusion of the pedagogical view on education and of teachers with Soviet experience from the departmental life-world.

Frameworks of reform and change were highly influential with regard to the education managers’ identity construction, making the departments into ‘local education change management departments’ rather than ‘education departments’ in the broader context of education science. Furthermore, the departments conceptualised change in Armenian higher education as their key concern, rather than education itself either as a global, universal phenomenon or as a social science. The status of education in the departments was strongly associated with reform and perceived Europeanisation. The understanding of Europeanisation, as shown in this research, was sharply contextualised and adapted to the experience of day-to-day practices. These frameworks of change and shifts of preference towards ‘what higher education has to be’ in relation to the perceived requirements of Europeanisation were strongly mirrored in the dissemination of managerial rather than pedagogical knowledge on education.

Institutional assessment of the universities had an impact on identity construction, being strongly related to quality assurance and accreditation. The higher education manager was defined as the person who could ‘make sense’ of this procedure, particularly in the view of the heads of the departments studied here.

Europeanisation had an influence through the social process of ‘significant othering’ with low levels of self-reflection. Although it had had a major impact through the funding schemes of UNESCO, EU TEMPUS and similar projects and the World Bank, the meaning attributed to Europeanisation was twofold, leading to the construction of an imitator identity. When the means of reaching the aim became an aim in itself – that is, when the funding was not the means to an end, but the end – an imitation performance of acceptance of Europe as a collectively defined and understood significant other became essential, although the level of local self-reflection was reduced. One important outcome of this reduction was the exclusion of an academic staff with a teacher identity (both Soviet and post-Soviet) from the education management community, leading to construction of anti-pedagogical managerial identities among the students, who saw education as a space for articulating authority rather than as a collaborative environment for teaching and learning.

The research and its findings have illustrated the potential contribution of a phenomenological sociological approach to the understanding of Europeanisation at local and national levels and in the post-Soviet context of Armenia, through a focus on perception and according experience of Europeanisation and how it was transformed into consciousness and constructed identities. The intention is not to reduce the phenomenon of Europeanisation to a set of generalised standards, guidelines and rules; rather, the research disclosed lived experience and the day-to-day enactment of Europeanisation, revealing it as a local, situated phenomenon – a dimension sometimes concealed by dominant theoretical patterns, policies and standardised views.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

This article is based on a dissertation work conducted at the University of Oxford, Department of Education. The work was supervised by Professor Jenny Ozga, whom I wish to sincerely thank. It would not have been possible to complete the research and this article without the support and encouragement she provided throughout my studies and beyond. I am extremely grateful to her for guidance and advice, for my novel introduction to the sociology of education and its emergent landscapes of thought, and for the considerable improvements to the standard of my academic thinking and writing.

Declaration of conflicting interest

The author declares that there are no conflicts of interest.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

Author biography

Sona Balasanyan is an alumna of the University of Oxford, Department of Education, UK (2014-2015). Currently, she is an Assistant Professor at the Yerevan State University, Faculty of Sociology, delivering series of courses (including Sociology of Education and Mixed Methods Research). Since 2016, she has joined the Caucasus Research Resource Center (CRRC)-Armenia Foundation as a research director.

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