The process of transition: teacher biographies and teachers' actions
In: Opening windows to change., S. 59-75
This contribution is part of a publication on the TEMPUS symposium to the European Conference on Educational Research (ECER) held in Edinburgh in September 2000. It was intended as a reflective, post- project evaluation of the development programme to prepare teachers to meet special educational needs (SEN) in Perm (a city of one million inhabitants 2000 km north-east from Moscow), and its continuation, extension, dissemination and effects on new related international work, including a follow-on TEMPUS-TACIS project.... The article is part of the second part of the publication, which relates the TEMPUS project to wider conditions for change in schools. It is too often assumed that such development projects involve partners in stable situations, offering possible models for a target beneficiary in transitional need and search of new anchorage.... East Germany, [ however], brings to the project its own dramatic experience of collapse and reconstruction. This chapter ... itself a collaboration between academics drawn from two formerly confronting German societies, explores key elements of teacher experience before and after the German "Wende", and illustrates the importance of teacher commitment to new approaches." What interested the authors was, "to discover how those teachers already in service in the GDR times dealt with the "Wende" and, in that context, with the transition to a new school system with changed ideological foundations; what were the effects of the "Wende" on their concepts, or more specifically, on their models of interpretation and action; and what, in the new circumstances, has been their readiness to participate in school development?" The authors took two methodological approaches: they "used the teachers' observations when confronted with their own video- recorded lessons, together with descriptive career biography interviews". (DIPF/Orig./Kr.).