PSCE Conference 
Abstracts: Seminar 1, Session 5
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EDUCATION AND CONFLICT IN CENTRAL ASIA
Alan DeYoung, University of Kentucky
School Reform in Central Asia
I am currently doing fieldwork in two - soon to be four - ethnically diverse village and small town secondary schools and their communities in the Kyrgyz Republic . The work is supported by the John J. and Nancy Roberts 2004 Fellowship, as administered by IREX. Selection and entre strategies for my fieldwork were facilitated via ACCELS, a significant NGO in Kyrgyzstan with a national network of participating schools and projects. I am working with and through alumni of the ACCELS Teachers Excellence Award (TEA) program, an annual program for Kyrgyz English teachers. Using qualitative methods, I am spending approximately six months in these four schools, collecting dozens of individual and group interviews with school officials, teachers, students and local government officials. In addition, I have access to open ended survey responses for 32 semi-finalists for the 2004 academic year. How each teacher understands and attempts to work with cultural and ethnic differences within the school and community is one of the four primary questions answered by all semifinalists. I propose to report on how the TEA semifinalists understood and answered the question posed to them related to potential conflicts in and among different ethnic communities they work in, and to report preliminary findings from my fieldwork on ethnic problems and conflicts as they are seen dealt with at the local school and community levels.
Mark Johnson, Colorado College
Trends in Secular Educational Development in Azerbaijan and Central Asia : Implications for Social Stability and Regional Security
My presentation for the first seminar will consist of a summary of a recent research project on educational policy trends in Azerbaijan and Central Asia and the implications of educational crises for social stability and regional security. To summarize these findings briefly, I outlined three tiers of states. The first (Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan) consists of states that have, if belatedly, recognized the need for systemic reform and, at least potentially, have the financial resources to implement systemic reform. The second tier ( Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan ) recognizes the need for reform at the level of policy, but remain paralyzed by endemic poverty and state incapacity. The third ( Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan ) seem locked in a downward trajectory of systemic educational failure.
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