WHEN:
Tuesday, 20 June 2017, 19:00
WHERE:
Ukrainian Institute, 79 Holland Park London W113SW
Language:
The talk will be in English.
Admission:
The event is free, but prior registration will be required. Please click here to register
Ukrainian education is on the move. As Ukraine embarked on the far-reaching and deep-going educational reform, the government and expert community naturally focused its main attention on providing a legal framework and changing the formal rules of the game. The new law on higher education was adopted in July 2014 and some other regulations in the same spirit in 2015 and 2016. The law encouraged more university autonomy in academic and administrative areas and significantly reduced bureaucratization of the HE system. The draft of the new law on education in general is already in the Parliament and, hopefully, it will be adopted in 2017. The Ministry of Education and Science produced an inspiring and innovative vision for the reform of secondary education entitled “New Ukrainian School”.
Nevertheless, implementation of the reform agenda in education remains far from being completed and resistance within academic community at large is strong. In such circumstances, the philosophy of success consists in building something almost from scratch. Wherever it is possible, it is worth creating new alternative institutions that will be able to flourish in the new legal context and set new standards for the most important areas of Ukraine’s education. The presentation will make an argument for such a philosophy and provide an overview of success stories of alternatives and their impact on the mainstream education in Ukraine.
Taras Dobko, Senior Vice-Rector of the Ukrainian Catholic University and one of Ukraine’s leading professionals in the system of higher education, will share his vision on the reform of Ukraine’s education.
Speaker’s biography:
Taras Dobko, PhD
Taras is is Senior Vice-Rector at the Ukrainian Catholic University; he is also Associate Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy. He holds an M.S. in Theoretical Mechanics from the Lviv National University, Department of Mathematics and Mechanics, Lviv, Ukraine. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy from the International Academy of Philosophy in the Principality of Liechtenstein. The title of his doctoral dissertation reads: Happiness of the Human Person. A Phenomenological Study of the Disclosure of the Human Person in Happiness. His research interests encompass phenomenology; personalism in ethics; secularization in post-modern culture; philosophy of religion. He has 18 years of administrative and teaching experience in higher education, including international experience in cooperation projects all over Europe and North America. Since 2015, he is a member of the National Team of Higher Education Reform Experts (HERE) in Ukraine. He is an expert in issues of quality assurance in higher education, academic culture and its role for advancing the management of the university.
