Partnerships in VET teacher education in Ukraine: experiences from an ERASMUS+ project
Authors:
Thomas Deissinger and Oksana Melnyk
University of Konstanz
Theme: International
Presentation:
Ukraine has a school-based VET system, which the government has started to actively reform since 2014/2015. Vocational teacher education (VTE), being directly connected to the VET system, has been subject to major problems since the 1990s (Radkevych et al. 2019). One of the ongoing problems is the lack of relevance of what future teachers learn at university with respect to the competences needed in schools.
With this problem in mind, the Erasmus+ project PAGOSTE (www.pagoste.eu) was launched in 2020, led by the motivation to contribute to improving new forms of governance in VTE by introducing cooperation mechanisms between higher education institutions, VET institutions and other stakeholders, including companies. The core of the project, which ended in January 2024, was to explore new ways to bridge the separated spheres between university-based VTE and the reality of teaching in vocational schools by fostering cooperation on different levels.
In the project, the Ukrainian partner universities worked out mechanisms of cooperation with vocational schools and employers. Besides online activities due to the war, the partners from European universities (Germany, Austria, Italy) offered a series of study visits and staff trainings for students, academic staff and vocational teachers in their respective countries. Also, the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine worked out a national concept for the implementation of partnership-based governance (PBG) in VTE. However, Covid and the war in Ukraine had a negative impact on the project implementation. Nevertheless, there is a strong conviction that VTE will become utterly important for the post-war development of the country (Deissinger/Melnyk 2024).
Our presentation will depict the aims and results of the project, and will discuss both its sustainability and the socio-cultural implications.