TITLE:
Implementation of Creative Education Policy in Russian Higher Education Curricula
AUTHORS:
Tamara Savelyeva
KEYWORDS:
Cultural Diversification Framework; Creativity Education; Non-Linearity; Curricular Implementation Model; Policy Enactment; Post-Soviet Environment; Re-Structuring; Russian Higher Education
JOURNAL NAME:
Creative Education,
Vol.5 No.2,
February
10,
2014
ABSTRACT:
An ongoing restructuring of Russian higher
education prioritizes development of a “creative educational system” as one of its policy directions. Following
this recent policy mandate, Russian universities have been introducing
new curricular models, which they adopt from the Western academic school of
teaching and learning. However, Western-designed curricular novelties and
methodologies that support creative education
policies have been criticized for lacking success in Russian HE due to key
differences in traditional cultures of
educational systems. How do faculty facilitate curricular changes in support of
the creative education policy? This study addresses this question
by exploring the implementation of a specific curricular module in the field of
creative education—the Sustainability project in two Russian universities. The
resulting descriptive model comprises antecedents,
processes, and contents of the project implementation under three broad categories of the university restructuring:
organization, environment, and relation. I discuss the findings in terms
of the two important characteristics of the resulted curricular implementation
model: (1) the culturally sensitive nature of creative education curricular
adaptation in post-Soviet higher education, and (2)
non-linearity of the curricular education policy enactment in Russian university
classrooms.