Disregarded epistemologies in education? Critical approaches to Sociologies and Histories of Education in Central and Eastern Europe: Introduction to the Special Issue
Elena UNGUREANU, Leyla SAFTA-ZECHERIA, Octavia BORȘ-GEORGESCU
Abstract
This special issue takes stock of current developments in the critical study of sociologies and histories of education in the Central and Eastern European region. It demarginalizes the intersection of marginalized disciplines within the field of educational sciences that is dominated by psychological and pedagogical approaches within a marginalized region within a global and planetary context. In this vein, the special issue brings together contributions that engage with conceptualizing the social in education, epistemological inequalities, ruptures and continuities within the field of education and social reproduction, governance and social justice in education.
Keywords: sociology of education; history of education; Central and Eastern Europe; epistemological inequalities
The Politics of Academic Legitimacy: Governance and Epistemic Justice in Poland and Romania
Anna BECKER, Florin D. SALAJAN
Abstract
This article examines how higher education governance in post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe functions as an epistemic regime, shaping which forms of knowledge are legitimized and which are marginalized. Focusing on Poland and Romania, it traces continuities from socialist-era ideological control to post-1989 reforms framed around modernization, internationalization, and competitiveness. While such reforms dismantled overt political censorship, they introduced new exclusions through managerialism, bibliometric evaluation, and the dominance of English in scholarly publishing. Historical case studies, including the suppression of intellectual traditions under socialism and the marginalization of national-language scholarship in the contemporary period, illustrate how governance mechanisms act as ‘epistemic filters.’ Drawing on decolonial and critical epistemology frameworks, the analysis foregrounds the persistence of disregarded epistemologies, locally rooted, interdisciplinary, and community-oriented forms of knowledge excluded from institutional recognition. The paper argues that addressing epistemic injustice in CEE universities requires rethinking evaluative infrastructures, fostering multilingual and regionally relevant scholarship, and recovering marginalized intellectual traditions. By linking governance structures to the politics of knowledge, the study contributes to debates on epistemic justice in comparative education and calls for governance models that embrace plurality, linguistic diversity, and the democratization of academic legitimacy.
Keywords: academic legitimacy; governance; epistemic justice; Poland; Romania
Epistemological gaps in medical education: a bibliometric and critical analysis of contemporary academic discourse
Radu-Mihai DUMITRESCU
Abstract
Contemporary medical education is shaped by imperatives of efficiency, measurability and standardisation, often to the detriment of epistemological reflection. This study investigates how epistemological themes—critical reflection, uncertainty, epistemic justice, reflective reasoning—are represented in recent academic discourse. A bibliometric analysis was carried out on a corpus of 2,830 PubMed-indexed articles (2015–2025), followed by a qualitative interpretation of keyword co-occurrence networks generated in VOSviewer at three thresholds (≥5, ≥20, ≥40 occurrences). The analysis revealed a discursive structure dominated by themes such as “curriculum”, “clinical competence”, “simulation”, “assessment” and “students”. In contrast, terms such as “epistemic uncertainty”, “critical thinking”, “reflective practice”, “epistemic injustice”, or “bias” were absent from the central networks or completely non-existent at high thresholds. Semantic clustering indicated a systemic orientation towards a performative, technological and algorithmic vision of medical training, to the detriment of the critical, narrative and humanistic dimensions of medical knowledge. Findings indicate the existence of systemic epistemological gaps, with implications for clinical reasoning, professional uncertainty management and the integration of patient experience as epistemic knowledge. The study suggests the need for a curricular reconfiguration that integrates epistemic reflection into medical training.
Keywords: medical education, epistemology, clinical reasoning, uncertainty, cognitive bias, critical reflection, epistemic injustice, VOSviewer, bibliometric analysis, medical curriculum, clinical competence, narrative medicine.
Teacher Mentoring: Histories, Translations, and Reforms in Romania and the Republic of Moldova
Mihaela MITESCU-MANEA
Abstract
This paper re-examines the historiography of teacher mentoring in Romania and the Republic of Moldova through the lens of Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory (ANT). In ANT, an actor-network refers to a material–semiotic assemblage in which agency emerges through associations among human and non-human elements. Rather than treating mentoring as a fixed institutional practice, the analysis conceptualises it as a contingent effect of these shifting assemblages of interactions among heterogeneous elements, including legislation, examination systems, mentor registries, school inspectorates, international organisations, professional discourses, material conditions and classrooms. These assemblages enrol and translate one another, producing temporary alignments that give mentoring its shifting historical forms. The study reveals that these configurations generate complex temporalities, where past arrangements persist and continue to influence current practices. In Romania, teacher mentoring has been predominantly framed as supervision, closely tied to examination practices and a centralised approach to teacher recruitment and validation of professional status. In the Republic of Moldova, it has often been conceptualised as professional support, aligning with Europeanisation discourses yet still marked by Soviet-era legacies. Notably, international agencies and geopolitical pressures emerge as powerful non-human actors, sometimes reinforcing and at other times destabilizing national practices. The paper argues that sustainable reform requires reconfiguring these actor-networks with attention to material conditions, temporal continuities, and geopolitical contexts. It proposes a research agenda informed by ANT that foregrounds translation, instability, and historical recurrence.
Keywords: teacher mentoring, teacher induction, Actor-Network Theory, Romania, Republic of Moldova.
Textbooks, Markets, and Meanings: Educational Reform in Postcommunist Romania
Dana SOLONEAN
Abstract
In 1995, the Romanian government launched the first large-scale education reform since the fall of communism. Largely financed through a World Bank loan, the reform targeted the sector’s core dimensions: mission, content, governance, and subjectivities. Textbooks were placed at the center of these transformations, with more than half of the total reform budget allocated to creating a free market for publishing companies responsible for producing textbooks and educational materials. This paper seeks to uncover the explicit and implicit rationalities that underpinned this decision. It argues that, in line with neoliberal ideology, textbooks were regarded as the most cost-effective investment in education. By the same token, the introduction of open competition in the private sector for the publishing, printing, and distribution of textbooks was framed as the most appropriate way to ensure higher textbook quality. However, the decision to prioritize textbooks was not solely driven by economic considerations. Drawing on critical approaches to textbook research, the paper contends that in the post-communist context, textbooks were seen as key instruments for disseminating the “legitimate knowledge” associated with the emerging political-economic order. However, the textbook reform could not have been carried out without the support of Romanian education specialists, who were both ideological and materially co-opted. Finally, the article highlights the inherent contradictions embodied in the ‘textbook’ in postcommunist Romania, particularly in relation to centralization, student–teacher relations, and social justice.
Keywords: textbooks, education reform, World Bank, Romania, neoliberalism
Romanian education under austerity: a critical discourse analysis of crisis talks and policy legitimation
Robert-Alexandru AVRAM
Abstract
This paper examines how austerity measures adopted in the Romanian educational system, in 2025, are discursively constructed through crisis talk - narratives that frame cuts and policy modifications as both inevitable and morally responsible. This research uses the critical discourse analysis method to analyse a corpus consisting of political speeches, public reactions of relevant stakeholders and legislative texts to identify hidden narratives and rhetorical strategies employed by the decision-makers throughout the summer of 2025, that are serving as a means of normalizing budgetary restrictions applied for the educational sector. The analysis highlights how governmental actors try to legitimize austerity as both inevitable and morally responsible, presenting sacrifice as a duty that must be shared collectively by all members of the society. Meanwhile, counter-discourses voiced by trade unions, NGOs, and representatives of students emphasize the consequences of the measures, social harm, erosion of trust, and the loss of dignity for teachers and students. Findings of this study show that austerity in Romanian education is legitimized less through fiscal reasoning and more through a moralized scarcity discourse that presents solidarity, inevitability, and collective duty as common-sense truths. The paper represents a contribution to research on neoliberal education policies by demonstrating that austerity operates as a discursive mode of governance—one that defines what is feasible, narrows policy alternatives, and justifies resource redistribution in the name of efficiency, while also addressing a gap in the research that does not provide insights into the in-depth effects of austerity in education, besides the economic results.
Keywords: Romania, austerity, education, policy legitimation, discourse
No locality left behind? Structural and institutional drivers of eighth-grade achievement and early human capital development in Romania
Ștefan-Marius DEACONU, Alina ROINIȚĂ
Abstract
This study explores the structural and institutional determinants of early human capital formation in Romania, from a territorial perspective. The paper focuses on educational performance measured at the lowest administrative and territorial unit in Romania. Data from the National Evaluation (final exam of lower secondary education) from 2022–2024 is used to analyse how local socioeconomic context, school organisation, and spatial configuration interact to shape student performance. We combine gender-disaggregated educational data with indicators of human development as well as income, education stock and further demographic characteristics. In this sense, the present analysis provides one of the first nationwide studies to investigate how local communities are converging or diverging in terms of educational outcomes. The results highlight that educational performance is highly path-dependent, as localities with historically higher education stock and human development in the past have an advantage in comparison with rural and less developed communities. As the latter tend to fall behind, the findings confirm that territorial inequalities are indeed reinforced through institutional differentiation – schools with legal personality (administrative autonomy) achieve better results than satellite structures, even when the socioeconomic context is similar. The moderation effect of institutional autonomy on the relationship between local development and exam performance outlines that human development alone is not sufficient to deliver convergence in the absence of strong capacity and flexible governance. Results outline that educational inequality in post-socialist Romania is more than a simple function of economic disparity, as it also works for institutional and spatial configurations. The study contributes to further European and international debate on regional convergence, decentralisation and human capital development, as it emphasises that equity in education cannot be achieved in the absence of policy and measures that address governance and autonomy of schools.
Keywords: lower secondary education, educational inequality, territorial development, institutional autonomy
With authority and empathy: the dual voice of kindergarten teachers in homogenizing ethnic and class differences in early childhood integration in Hungary
Zsuzsanna ÁRENDÁS, Vera MESSING, Ágnes KENDE
Abstract
The present article examines institutional discourses on preschool "integration" in Hungary through qualitative interviews with kindergarten teachers in three ethnically mixed communities. The research investigates boundary-making processes in everyday parenting practices related to the institutional context of early childhood education. In the paper, we focus on how boundaries are (re)constructed in and by the institution of the kindergarten. Our analysis draws on two theoretical frameworks to situate the empirical data: Bourdeau’s concept of symbolic violence, which elucidates the hierarchical relationship between families and kindergarten professionals, and theories of street-level bureaucracy, which shed light on the dual identity of kindergarten teachers as both authoritative figures and empathetic caregivers. Findings from our research suggest that kindergartens, the first compulsory institutional settings for children in Hungary, play a key role in transmitting and enforcing community norms and thus serve as a key instrument for fostering social cohesion. However, the integration mission of teachers and institutions is framed around middle-class norms, positioning them as exclusive standards to which all children and parents need to conform. The key (unintended) consequence of this integration mission is the erasure of cultural and ethnic differences, often accompanied by racializing discourses about the Roma. This study critically examines the integration approach widely shared in early education pedagogy, revealing both its social costs and purported benefits.
Keywords: kindergarten integration, Roma, boundary-making, symbolic violence, street level bureaucracy
Narratives of Pedagogical Journeys: Exploring the Intergenerational Transmission of Teacher Habitus
Simona ADAM
Abstract
Anticipatory socialization for a teaching career involves shaping a social representation of the profession by adopting values, beliefs, and behaviors. Pre-service teachers have many vital experiences before entering teacher training programs, which influence their understanding of what teaching entails. Primary socialization, during which the family transmits cultural capital and habitus to the younger generation, impacts their motivation to become teachers and sometimes provides role models for this career. This study is based on grounded theory research of autobiographical essays collected over the last five years from pre-service teachers enrolled in the final year of master's level studies in various specializations, as well as in the second level of teacher training at a Romanian university. To analyze the intergenerational transmission of teacher habitus, a theoretical sampling of 43 essays was selected, comprising narratives by pre-service teachers whose family members were teachers. The qualitative analysis of the essays reveals subtle mechanisms through which the teacher-parents influenced their children and often shaped an ideal image of the teacher role. By observing their parents (or other members of the extended family) playing the role of a teacher, the pre-service teachers internalized values and beliefs that form the ground of their teacher identity.
Keywords: intergenerational transmission, habitus, pre-service teacher, anticipatory socialization, autobiographic narrative
In Defense of Schooling: readings of the crisis of schooling in late socialist sociology of education in Romania
Leyla SAFTA-ZECHERIA
Abstract
The paper explores the question of how the crisis of schooling as theorized by P.H. Coombs and more radically Paulo Freire and Ivan Illich, was read by sociologists of education and futurologists in late socialist Romania by placing these in the context of debates around schooling that cut across the Iron Curtain. By inserting the debates surrounding the crisis of schooling in state socialist Romania, a country with targeted educational innovation policies directed at engaging with and overcoming the crisis of schooling, the present paper sheds light on a less known side of understanding the crisis of schooling, namely by taking a perspective from within state socialism. The crisis of schooling emerged around 1968 as youth movements were changing the face of education around the world and predicated initially a disconnect between the means of preparing youth for the future and the aspirations of people around the world, as well as the increased knowledge demands of developing socio-economic contexts. However, around this time a second strand of critical intellectual production seeking to radically break with schooling emerged: a tradition that became famous under the headline of Ivan Illich’s concept of ‘deschooling’ but was also an important driving force in Paulo Freire’s critique of ‘banking education’. In line with Marxist criticism of deschooling from both capitalist and socialist countries, sociologists of education in Romania vehemently defended schooling on the grounds that its inadequacies were perfectible and its social function primordial. However, they also saw in schooling the promise to transform relationships between knowledge production (in terms of research), production processes and education through integrating these three dimensions in schools. As such the article brings context to how the world crisis of education was engaged transformatively during late socialism and thus helps rebalance epistemologically the legacy of unilateral accounts of the crisis of schooling brought about by the end of the Cold War. Finally, the paper shows how the ‘first global crisis of education’ was turned into a ‘tame’ policy issue and how this laid the groundwork for the post-Cold-War tradition of educational governing through crises.
Keywords: deschooling, dialogic pedagogy, state socialism, right to education
Kominkan as a Model for Non-Formal Education and Community-Based Sustainable Development in Japan
Khalaf Mohamed ABDELLATI
Abstract
This paper examines the historical evolution and contemporary significance of Japan’s Kominkan (community learning centers) as vital institutions for community-based sustainable development (CBSD). Emerging from the ashes of World War II, Kominkan were conceived as engines for democratic reconstruction and social cohesion. Utilizing a historical analysis framework and drawing upon Japanese educational policy documents, scholarly literature, and UNESCO reports, this paper traces the transformation of Kominkan functions from post-war recovery through rapid economic growth to the era of lifelong learning and Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). This paper argues that Kominkan’s inherent flexibility, community-rootedness, and focus on mutual learning position them uniquely as platforms for CBSD. The analysis highlights key shifts: from initial poverty alleviation and cultural revival to addressing urbanization’s social fragmentation, adapting to lifelong learning paradigms, and increasingly incorporating ESD and Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) post-2011. Despite challenges in human resource capacity, particularly the reliance on part-time staff, Kominkan demonstrate remarkable resilience in fostering social capital, empowering local agency, and mobilizing communities towards sustainable futures. The paper concludes that Kominkan offer a globally relevant model for leveraging non-formal education infrastructure for sustainable community resilience and development.
Keywords: Kominkan, Community Learning Centers, Community-Based Sustainable Development (CBSD), Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), Non-formal Education in Japan
From games to grit: Examining the impact of structured play activities on persistence development in early childhood settings
Mirela Lăcrimioara COSMA, Carmen Alina BERCE, Ioana BUDA-GAVRA
Abstract
Introduction: Persistence is recognized as a foundational skill for success in life, contributing significantly to the formation of a growth mindset in early childhood, enabling preschoolers to overcome obstacles and complete tasks. The current research is justified by an observed deficit in motivation and persistence among current young generations, who often tend to give up at the first obstacle or failure, and by a gap in applied studies within the Romanian context. The study’s primary objective was to investigate how persistence, defined as the ability to maintain effort in the face of difficulties, can be developed in preschoolers through an intervention program based on interactive activities and board games.
Methods: The research utilized an experimental design involving two groups of large-group preschoolers (aged 4 to 5). The experimental group participated in a nine-week intervention program consisting of 13 structured activities, including seven board games and five different interactive activities. Persistence was evaluated using the Dimensions of Mastery Questionnaire (DMQ), tracking five specific subdomains: cognitive persistence, motor persistence, social persistence (with adults and children), and mastery enjoyment.
Results: Results demonstrated that the intervention significantly improved total persistence in the experimental group when compared to both the pretest phase and the control group. Statistically significant increases were observed, particularly in cognitive persistence, motor persistence, and enjoyment of mastering new skills. The post-intervention differences between the experimental and control groups became even more pronounced and statistically significant for all subscales, sustaining the program's effectiveness. However, the study found no statistically significant influence based on gender or the quality of the relationship with the educator on persistence development.
Conclusions: These findings validate the effectiveness of game-based methods in early education, suggesting that integrating educational games that require patience, concentration, and task completion is a developmental capacity that supports success later in life. The study underscores the role of parents and teachers in providing adequate support and showing children that constant effort is more valuable than immediate success. Future research should address methodological limitations, such as pre-existing group differences and subjective evaluation, by conducting longitudinal studies and implementing external pretest/posttest evaluation.
Keywords: early education, persistence, interactive activities, board games, intervention programs.
The relationship between adolescents' well-being and academic performance: Systematic Review
Isabela RĂDEANU, Mariana MOMANU
Abstract
Over the last decade, interest in student well-being has grown significantly across psychology, education, health and economics. This review highlights the importance of prioritising student well-being within education systems, recognising that both schools and policy makers play a crucial role in promoting it. This systematic review synthesises empirical studies on the association between well-being and academic performance in adolescents. Following PRISMA guidelines, we searched PubMed, PsycINFO, ERIC, Web of Science, Scopus, JSTOR, ScienceDirect, Google Scholar and ResearchGate between June and September 2023, using combinations of terms related to well-being, academic performance and adolescence. Inclusion criteria were: peer-reviewed articles published in English from 2010 onwards; samples with adolescents aged 10–19; quantitative designs; at least one indicator of well-being and one of academic performance; and analyses of the association between these constructs. Seventeen studies met the criteria, involving a total of 276,559 students from diverse cultural and educational contexts. Across studies, higher levels of well-being (e.g., life satisfaction, psychological, social and school well-being, engagement) were generally associated with better academic outcomes (grades, test scores, perceived academic competence). At the same time, some evidence pointed to trade-offs, whereby high academic pressure was linked to lower well-being despite good performance. Socio-emotional factors (e.g., self-efficacy, self-esteem, peer and teacher relationships) and contextual characteristics (e.g., school climate, socioeconomic status) emerged as important mediators and moderators. Overall, the findings suggest a positive association between adolescent well-being and academic performance, while also underscoring the risk of achievement-oriented climates that undermine students’ mental health. The review identifies conceptual and methodological gaps, particularly the limited number of longitudinal studies and the scarcity of evidence from Eastern Europe, and highlights the need for educational policies that integrate academic and well-being aims.
Keywords: well-being, academic performance, adolescents
West University of Timisoara, Faculty of Sociology and Psychology, Department of EDUCATIONAL SCIENCES
