First DEI Seminar:
Curriculum Change in a Time of War: Russian Literature and Ukrainian Education
Thursday April 20th 2023, Room E2.18 Science East
On 13 June 2022, in response to the February invasion by Russia and the ongoing war, the Ministry for Education and Science of Ukraine declared that literary works by Russian authors would be withdrawn from the Foreign Literature syllabus for secondary school students across Ukraine. In this paper, (opens in a new window)Adam Kelly and Iryna Kovalchuk will contextualise this decision by offering a history of Ukrainian literary education since the collapse of the Soviet Union. They will argue that the transition from teaching majority Russian-language texts to majority Ukrainian-language texts in schools was an important aspect in the development of national identity in independent Ukraine. This educational change was an uneven process, however, and the paper will trace its fluctuations in response to institutional and political developments across the three decades since 1991.
(From left to right: (opens in a new window)Joe Carthy, Iryna Kovalchuk, (opens in a new window)Adam Kelly, (opens in a new window)Conor Galvin)
(opens in a new window)Adam Kelly is associate professor of English at UCD, and PI on the IRC Laureate project "Imaginative Literature and Social Trust, 1990-2025" (TRUST).
Iryna Kovalchuk is assistant professor of English Philology and Intercultural Communication at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. Her work at UCD on the TRUST project is funded through the IRC Ukrainian Researchers Scheme.
Discussants:
(opens in a new window)Conor Galvin is a university lecturer in the School of Education and is the UCD lead on TAP-TS (an ERASMUS+ Teacher Academies project involving higher education institutions in five European countries) and JMTEP-UCD (an inaugural Jean Monnet Teacher Action on European Citizenship and Values). .
(opens in a new window)Joe Carthy is full professor in the School of Computer Science and founding Director of the UCD Centre for Cybersecurity and Cybercrime Investigation. When College Principal he led on the UCD Scholars at Risk programme.