Rob Evans
A long break – researching changing educational cultures through HE professionals' experience of system change in East Germany since 1989
Rob Evans
Language Centre, University of Magdeburg, Germany
Paper presented at the 36th Annual SCUTREA Conference, 4-6 July 2006, Trinity and All Saints College, Leeds
In the wake of the collapse of the East German regime in the autumn of 1989 and the subsequent highly turbulent process of unification with West Germany (called the 'Wende' in German), practically overnight whole swathes of the working population of the GDR found themselves confronted with, and dramatically challenged by, a Western model of civil society and its institutions. The relatively well-known effects of unification, the wholesale transfer of West German institutions of government and business to East Germany and the dramatic rupture with the assumptions and expectations of the immediate past experienced by the populations of the East throughout the nineties and into the new century, have been the object of stimulating studies in biography research in this country as in Germany itself (e.g. Bertram and Kollmorgen 2001, Bynner and Silbereisen 2000, Chamberlayne, Bornat and Wengraf 2000, Fischer-Rosenthal, Alheit and Hoerning 1995). For many people in the East, and especially those formerly in public employment in the GDR, political change was followed by an arduous and not infrequently arbitrary process of evaluations, carried out in waves over a period of years at the beginning of the 'nineties by governmental and self-appointed ad hoc bodies, by means of which West German – free market – notions of democratic citizenship and professional accountability were established.
For the education sector, too, this signified a realignment of pedagogical principles, goals and contents. Institutions of higher education were re-poled, re-staffed, re-structured, and HE educators, both those who count as 'survivors' of the great change and those who were swept out of the institutions in which they formed their professional identities, were constrained to re-define their professional engagement in a context that saw their cultural and political capital sorely reduced. This post-89 positioning of the 'survivors' cancelled whole biographies as well as the institutional trappings of those life-stories. Alheit et al(2004) have begun to sketch in the feeling of being 'hemmed in' which characterises in part the social space in which many of those who carried their work over from the GDR into the new Federal German civil society live(d) through the change process, emphasising the backward-looking or stalemate nature of many individual biographies, thwarted and baulked, so to speak, because they remain still today largely unasked for and untellable. In this situation, educational practice and reflection upon it among many former GDR professionals is predicated on competing pasts, in which social history as well as civil society and its values are bound to a still unchallenged life-world history which has been played out over decades in culturally diverse environments.
This paper will attempt to account forsocial discourse(s) of learning and institutional identity as recorded in talk with HE professionals at a university in the former East Germany within the framework of the transition process. Co-constructed in-depth narrative interviews carried out as part of the 2005 celebration of 50 years of language training in this and its forerunner institutions, the talk of these professionals is understood as constituting emerging learning biographies. In the interviews the university is narrated and seen as negotiating an uneasy transition to an increasingly market-driven service role in a region still struggling with unemployment and depopulation 15 years after the fall of the Wall and Unification. The paper addresses directly the nature of educational research, viewing educational processes as situated within a biographical, lifelong perspective and embraces methodological insights of newer educational biography research. A further concern of this paper is the influence of diverse cultural discourses of the 'social' and the 'individual' on the co-production of biographical data in talk. The researcher's role, straddling and embodying both East-West intra-cultural as well as wider intercultural influence in the research process is addressed here, too.
The Case Study: Professionals moving through change
Between the early summer and autumn of 2005, I interviewed thirteen members of staff of the language centre of an East German university. Interviews were arranged and conducted for the most part after the end of the semester when a certain calm had set in. Eleven of the 13 interviews were individual, 2 members of staff were interviewed together, for the only reason that they happened to be together in their room when an opportune moment arose. The average length of each interview was 90 minutes, though 3 exceeded this (150, 180 and 240 minutes respectively). All were recorded with a digital recording device except for 2, on the express wish of the interviewees in these 2 cases not to record anything. The digital recordings were transferred to my PC and to CD-ROMs, for future analysis with text-analysis software (for a discussion of digital collection and analysis see Evans 2004).
Setting up the research
The opportunity to begin the process of interviewing was provided by the decision of the language department to celebrate its 50 years of uninterrupted activity. The initial response of a number of colleagues in the department was scepticism on hearing that the past was to be celebrated in this fashion. There was subdued talk of 'old scores' and 'forgotten stories', and speculation about likely guests and 'non-persons'. As a very new member of staff, having only taken up employment at M 5 months before being asked to contribute to the planned conference in some way, I could be seen as largely 'safe' – someone, so to speak, neither connected with the past, nor with the difficult period of the 'Wende', neither a fellow East German, nor a prejudiced West German, unacquainted with the personal and institutional history of the place and sufficiently unknown to be a 'blank piece of paper' in everyone's eyes equally. Approaches made to individual colleagues to agree to be interviewed were cautious and slow. Most interviews required a set-up time of at least one month before a suitable time or venue could be agreed.
Trust, questions, emotions
Trust was built up tentatively, slowly, in the course of preparatory conversations. Distrust of the ends and purposes of a possibly resulting interview transcript and misgivings regarding the possibility that others might somehow get to hear of their confidences needed to be met with repeated and pressing assurances of confidentiality. The result in most cases was a series of individual confidences, hedged and careful (framed in both verbal and physical terms) in their treading around the troubled history of the people and the institution, and yet granted with a measure of trust placed in the researcher as a pledge of candour. The respondents claimed a deposit of 'emotional labour' (Malcolm 2006)from the researcher, demanding implicitly both silence henceforth and fitting use of their communications in whatever academic form the results of the interviews were to be made known.
Mapping professional trajectories
Taken together, the interviews narrated a collective story of professionals who managed the transition from system to system, from a place in a 'directed' professional trajectory to new career and citizenship roles and from organised private spaces in a 'beleaguered' political society to the exposed individualism of a seemingly politically indifferent civil society. Successful management of the transition took one of five forms: exit (timely retirement or successful side-stepping into a related yet different area of work); continuity (the largest group, moving on through the subsequent re-namings and re-shufflings of their institutional 'home'); re-orientation (from training courses to radical re-invention of the future specialisation); switch (moving from one area of specialisation to another already cultivated and strategically held in preparation, a 'timely' move in the right direction) and new entry (the smallest group, entering the profession in the very swell of change). Each form of success, however, which each of these in their special way represent, was narrated as experience lived against a backdrop of total insecurity. This insecurity, reflected afterwards in attitudes of scepticism, mistrust and diffidence towards the uneven processes of HE reform and re-structuring throughout the first years after 1990, must be seen in the context of the professional certainties lived prior to that date.
Biographies in transition: notions of the 'social' and the 'individual'
With the 'Wende', then, came massive threats of insecurity, unemployment, marginalization; career and what seemed a stable life purpose in one went off the tracks within weeks, months. My respondents were, with one exception, all in full and stable employment at the time of the fall of the Wall. Despite the signs of political instability that had begun to make themselves seen and felt since the late 70s (Alheit 1995: 107-108), the certainties and guarantees officially enshrined and maintained in GDR institutions and practices for traditional routes to qualifications, to adulthood, to family life and maturity existed and persisted till the bare reality of the 'transition' of 1989 arrived. At a sweep, as Bynner and Silbereisen remark, notions of security were radically reformulated: 'Such developments, characteristic of risk societies ... passing through late modernity ... challenge particularly the German notion of identity based on occupation, "I am what I am trained to be"'(Bynner and Silbereisen 2000: 4).
The literature on the GDR is unanimous in characterising this society as 'regulated', in which careers were highly “standardised”, with the result that people had widespread high expectations of security and stability(Berger 2001: 249). Further and higher education targets were very significantly oriented to the creation and furtherance of the 'specialist worker' (Facharbeiter) and qualifications in all institutions and at all levels were couched in technically egalitarian terms (Sackmann and Wingens 1995: 119), so that Alheit speaks of the 'egalitarian modesty' which went to make up the centrally determined middle-of-the-road habitus in GDR everyday life (Alheit 1995: 102), while Sackmann and Wingens characterise the GDR as a 'career-centred society' (Sackmann and Wingens 1995: 120). In the GDR, significantly for what came after the 'Wende', there was, too, essentially no difference in the way men and women saw this, both defining themselves and their life courses largely according to work relationships (Berger 2001: 250-251). Where stable career structures represent a foundation of the life-course plan, career identity is naturally fortified in the same way: the linking within the professional spaces of the GDR of career, profession and identity was felt to guarantee on a social level 'stable external evaluation' and on the individual level 'stable self-evaluation'(Corsten 1995: 48). Further, on account of the thorough regulation and political control of vocational and educational training there existed a regime of what Berger calls 'sufficient qualification', i.e. there existed the generally automatic reward of an appropriate job for a certain qualification. This made possible 'practically exact biographical planning potential'(Berger 2001: 259). This is reflected unambiguously in the biographies of my interviewees, whereby it is interesting that the formal workings of the system are seen to be the trigger for both unquestioning accommodation to the directing hand of the state/institution in the choice of career, subjects, specialisation, work-placement and promotion as well as fascinating evidence of private self-initiative and self-directed 'biography-career work' working against the grain of official career planning.
Change, risk and professional capital
A factor affecting post-1989 reactions to the rush of change and the West-driven general overhauling of professional positions, qualifications and practices, and providing a partial explanation of reactions of accommodation, apathy or resignation, was the relative political and economic marginality of this professional group prior to the 'Wende'. After an initial period - to express a complex process very simply - reaching from the 1950s to the 1970s, in which 'proletarian' elements were given preference in the university teaching profession, the latter years of the GDR, it has been argued, saw the reproduction of the class of intellectuals out of its own ranks,a reason for this being that in the late GDR economic capital was scarcely accessible via these careers (Lötsch 1995). 'Ambition' and personal aims, before and more crucially during and after unification, must, I would argue, be understood in the light of this relative marginality. By the late 1980s, Lötsch points out, the academic and 'intellectual' professions (the 'Intelligenz') had been pushed to the very bottom of the social hierarchy of esteem and had lost much of their attraction for new entrants (Lötsch 1995: 183).
After 1989 along with the threat to employment for the members of the professions came 'evaluation', political, professional, official and ad hoc, in addition. Boards of evaluators, largely brought in from the West, were employed in 'running-down' processes, euphemisms for collective dismissals and the relegation of tried specialists to the ranks of the apprentices, if not the unemployed. The experience of evaluations, two three or more within the space of as many years, was shared by all my interviewees, yet with the exception of only one, no overt mention was made of this time. A cryptic, andchillingly abstract (and significantly ahistorical) remark from another interviewee that seemed to refer indirectly to the evaluation and clear-out process was: "After every war there have been things like that …"
There is much in the narrativescollected here that re-proposes a common reaction: in place of critical self-reorientation we see something like acceptance and adaptation to social constraints as a reflex reaction (see Korfes 1995). The whole process of evaluation from without and without recourse to known institutions and the security of recognisable outcomes seems to generate at best a rapid, cynical-adaptive judgement and it seems plausible to hear in this a tension that, perhaps surprisingly, after 15 years is still unresolved. Korfes, in her examination of the same phenomenon in relation to members of the legal profession comes to the conclusion that 1) those who were taken on again after the evaluation process took the date of their reinstatement as the start of a new phase in their professional (and personal) biographies, and 2) they surprisingly and somewhat confusingly presented their career biographies as examples of continuity, where their professional workplaces had changed in every conceivable fashion, suggesting that this rationalisation serves as a means of overcoming the break in their biographies (Korfes 1995: 160-2).
Learning new roles, moving into new professional spaces
Place, space(s) and position are recurrent images in these professionals' biographical narratives. Finding and defining oneself in the process of negotiating the transition from one institution to another, where the physical environment remains unchanged yet re-named and re-formulated,takes place within given local horizons. The employment of location as a powerful contextualizing device in individual learning biographies (see Evans 2004), and its function as a vehicle for enrichment of narratives through the insertion of elements of time, indexicality and recognizable group/place identities, can be seen particularly well in many of the learning biographies collected here. Thus, the retraining institution, the new colleagues, former and new gatekeepers, new contents, novel study and teaching methods, but equally the challenges and insecurities experienced handling new theory, unfamiliar literature, foreign professional bodies, etc, are evoked as instances of success and defeat.
The return to training, the leap into wholly new specialisations, the transfer to safer fields of employment (e.g. the schools) can entail using education to shape one's own biography and identity in a reflexive way. Decisions about themselves and the future course of their lives are what these people are taking, and often these decisions involve a major change from, or break with, their past lives and identities. Likewise, re-formulating one's professional status and adapting to a new habitus may, too, involve developing new forms of embodied cultural capital, of which language and emotions, new social behaviours and practices are an important part (Baxter and Britton 2001: 89). Erosion of class, family and local-regional relationships,as well as conflict with 'other/prior identities' may be part of the price paid for change (Baxter and Britton 2001: 99).
The difficulty of constructing biographies of transition
The important point it seems to me here is that with the disruption of the social space within which careers and CVs were projectable and secured, the accumulated knowledge of institutions and structures, places and people, behaviours and customs which taken together make up 'biographical knowledge' (Rabe-Kleberg 1995: 36) is in danger of being devalued or simply scrapped. Such 'biographical knowledge' can be individual and collective, specific to a class or a generation (and both or all, of course), is gendered and empowered/disempowered and can be seen as the basis of that ability to consider one's biography anew at each phase of its construction – i.e. agency – which is a crucial feature of biographical competence. Rabe-Kleberg argues convincingly that the extension of the concept of devaluation of biographical knowledge commonly applied in migration research to explain the catastrophic loss of routine competence in migrants, finding themselves separated from their own networks and relationship structures and adrift, so to speak, in a foreign, alien environment, can be aptly applied to many people of the former GDR, who though they remained where they were (forgetting for a moment the significant numbers who chose to migrate to the West) found themselves overtaken and swamped by the institutions and gatekeepers of West Germany, with the resulting experience of ignorance and the loss of that vital biographic knowledge necessary to maintain options and paths to autonomous decision-making and to construct biographies which make use of a whole range of meanings validated in social, cultural and intercultural interaction (Rabe-Kleberg 1995: 36-37).