Education department faculty member Bird Stasz will leave March 19 for Tajikistan, the first in a series of trips that will involve Stasz and other department faculty to help the country revive its teacher education system in the aftermath of civil war.
Stasz, along with Glenda Crawford and Deborah Long, will work with the PEAKS (Participation, Education, and Knowledge Strengthening in Central Asia) project, part of a series of continuing World Bank initiatives for education reform in Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. The Elon group will focus its efforts in Tajikistan, which faces more challenges than the other three countries, Stasz says.
“In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union the once-strong education infrastructure of Tajikistan is in dissray–this is particularly true of teacher education,” Stasz says. “Teachers face many hardships in many schools, such as a lack of books, paper or electricity.” The oldest settled country in Central Asia, Tajikistan was incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1924 and declared independence in 1991. A complicated and costly civil war followed, ending in 2000 with the country virtually in ruins.
Stasz will meet with officials at the Tajik ministry of education, as well as university deans and other policymakers during her initial visit. She will travel to various parts of the country to assess the situation firsthand. In May and August, Stasz, Crawford and Long will travel to Tajikistan to conduct training programs with teacher education programs at the university level. The program is scheduled to last two years but could be extended.
“The goal is to help them design and implement a model of teacher development for a sustainable future,” says Stasz, who has been involved with this type of work since 1995 through the Roma School Initiative, which examines education throughout Europe and Asia. “We’re still working on what that model will look like.”
Crawford believes the experience will allow the group to bring unique experiences back to their students at Elon as well.
“We’ll be working in a different culture and under some fairly dire conditions,” says Crawford. “That’s going to give us a greater appreciation for the resources teachers have here at home.”
Stasz echoes those sentiments. “It is what education is all about. Having faculty in education do this kind of work offers a good role model for our students.”