Exploring Quality Education in Tajikistan: A desk review and methodological implications of conducting research in the Global South contexts

• In Event: Education Reforms in Comparative Perspective

Proposal

Since independence, Tajikistan’s education has been experiencing expansion and undergoing several reform efforts, in order to preserve the achievements of the Soviet time (such as 99 % literacy and access), meet the needs and challenges of creating a new nation state, and join the global economy. While Tajikistan has virtually universal primary enrolment of children in primary grades, other challenges to quality education and achieving SDG4 in education have remained. In 2012, Tajikistan introduced a Competency-Based Education (CBE) reform in general secondary education with an effort to improve the quality of education by transitioning from knowledge-based learning to the development of competencies and skills. This was also done in part to align with global trends and definitions of “quality of education”. The Competency-Based Education (CBE) reform agenda has required the country to redefine its understanding of “learning” and “quality of learning” by moving from delivery of information to building students’ skills and influencing their values. A number of development partners such as Aga Khan Foundation, Asian Development Bank, European Union, Islamic Development Bank, UNICEF, USAID, and World Bank have been supporting the reform by constructing new and renovating existing schools, and revising curriculum, pedagogy, assessment, and teacher training; developing new teaching and learning materials, and setting up a National Testing Centre. In 2019, Tajikistan announced a full transition to a CBE system. However, the limited available evidence on the quality of education suggests that schools in Tajikistan continue to experience declining achievement and completion rates. While quality of education as an umbrella term for most internationally-supported education reform has been in circulation in Tajikistan and Central Asia for the last decade, not enough and reliable studies are available on the classroom implementation of CBE and factors affecting the low achievement and attainment levels and the extent CBE reform has achieved its intended goals.
Our paper presents a desktop review of available material in Tajik, Russian or English on Tajikistan stakeholders’ perspectives on the quality of education. In particular, our review paper examined the published and unpublished reports and articles on how local stakeholders in Tajikistan view quality education, what it means to them, why is it important, what has been done about it, what issues and challenges exist, and how they could be addressed to further help achieve quality education for school-aged children and youth, especially at the secondary level. The desktop review was a part of a larger research project, Exploring school-based education stakeholders’ perspectives on quality of education in Kyrgyz Republic and Tajikistan in the context of Schools2030 initiative.
While the desktop review turned out to be a valuable research undertaking, it actually signified a shift in the project’s methodology and nature due to local contextual realities of the time, i.e., 2021-2022. Against this backdrop, in addition to highlighting the contextual nuances of the meaning, importance, dimensions and challenges of providing quality education, our paper also presents interesting methodological and ethical insights about local–regional-global collaboration in terms of research and field work, especially on the saturated topic of quality education. We have found much evidence of the perspectives of major institutional actors, domestic and international, on inputs, processes, outputs and outcomes of education needed for quality of education. At the same time, data on the perspectives on and experiences of quality in education of school-based stakeholders such as school leaders, teachers, students and parents is much less evident. This gap signals the need to supplement existing research with qualitative and survey-based research on grass-roots perspectives on what the purposes of education are and related understandings of what quality education is and what is needed to provide it. Any revised attempt at undertaking such field work/empirical study should take into consideration the contextual nuances in North-South, South-South, and Government- INGOs relationships at every step of the research project.

Authors

• Stephen Arnold Bahry, OISE (University of Toronto)

• Sarfaroz Niyozov, OISE, University of Toronto