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Klagenfurt meeting for the preparation of the Sofia Conference on educational cooperation in South-Eastern Europe
17. 9. - 19.9. 1999
Managing diversity
Preamble
Education can only work within a social, economic, political and cultural frame. Although education
plays a crucial role it cannot be successful without support from the other fields. Education is an
important complement to economic, social, poltical and cultural measures.
In the following we are going to use the concept of South Eastern Europe although being well aware
that this construction refers to very diverse realities. If one looks at educational systems of South
Eastern European countries, one has to differentiate bewteen post-war countries and their particular
problems such as traumatization and segregating societies on the one hand and countries which have
not gone through that misery on the other hand. Especially with view to the management of diversity
this differentiation is of crucial importance.
Educational systems have been and often are considered as powerful means of constructing national
identities. There are various competing concepts having an impact on educational systems such as
centralization, decentralization, nation-building, autonomy and diversity. Such a contradictory system
neither meets the demands of a globalized society nore the needs of the population.
Status quo
Within the last ten years a great number of reforms and projects have been undertaken by national
authorities, international organizations and NGOs to improve the situation in education: -
Multicultural education has been put on the political agenda.
- Minorities are given more attention.
- Models of mananging diversity have been developed.
- Individuals and representatives of different cultural backgrounds have been brought together
and involved into controversial discussions preparing the ground for networks for the
exchange of experience and for cooperation.
- The involvement of NGOs engaged in education for peace, democracy, diversity and respect for otherness contributes to democratization.
However introducing and strengthening the process of managing diversity in education faces a number
of problems:
- The concept of diversity is often restricted to ethnicity ignoring the reality of multiple
identities (gender, age, social status etc). This leads to emphazising tendencies of
segregation.
- As far as ethnicity is concerned, mangement of diversity is predominantly limited to the
promotion of minority rights and does not involve society as a whole.
- The balance between unity and diversity is not given enough attention.
- Concepts of diversity management often lack adaptation to the realities of the region.
- The reanimation of ethnic myth is an impediment to the democratic management of diversity.
- There is a lack of partnership between Eastern and Western experts due to limited confidence
in local expertise and to restricted respect and knowledge as far as local capacities and
resources are concerned. Therefore too often ready made solutions and recepies are given
priority.
- Cooperation on different levels - ranging from the local to the cross-border level - is hardly
developed which hinders the dissemination process.
- There is a basic discrepancy between the length of time educational change takes and the
amount of time available for the implementation of projects. Short term projects and random
choice of participants and projects diminish the impact these project might have. Equally
under these conditions sustainability is hard to achieve.
- Management of diversity must rely on multipliers as agents of change. This concept has not
proved as effective as had been expected for several reasons: lack of adequate training,
supervision of implementation processes is insufficiant and there is no concept of evaluation
and no evaluation mechanismes in place.
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