(Post)Socialist Transformation of Primary Schools (PDF)

University.



Michal simáne is a graduate of the Department of Educational Sciences at the Faculty of Arts of Masaryk University, Czech Republic. He currently works as a head of the Department of Social Sciences and the deputy director of the Institute of Lifelong Learning at Mendel University in Brno, Czech Republic. His focus is on the history of pedagogy and education in the 19th and 20th centuries and on the problems of vocational education. Between 2019 and 2022, he was the main researcher in the research project Secondary Technical School in Socialist Czechoslovakia from the History of the Everyday Life Point of View: Oral History Interviews with Teachers. From 2014 to 2016, he was a member of the research team for the project Everyday life of basic schools in the normalization period as seen by teachers: Applying oral history to research in history of contemporary education. He is the author or co-author of several books on the history of Czechoslovak education in the interwar period and in the socialist period. These include the monographs C Secondary Technical Schools in Czechoslovakia During the Communist Era: Everyday Life from the Perspective of Teachers in South Moravian Region (2023), Czech Minority Education in the Czechoslovak Republic. To the Everyday Life of Primary Schools in Political District Ústí nad Labem (2019), Normal Life in Not-So-Normal Times: Primary Schools and Their Teachers (Not Only) During the So-Called Normalization Period (2017), and Socialist Primary School as Seen by Eyewitnesses: Probing teachers' lives in the South Moravian Region (2017). He regularly publishes in academic journals, such as Paedagogica Historica, History of Education, and Communist and Post-Communist Studies. He is on the editorial board of several academic journals.



Oto Poloucek is an Assistant Professor at the Department of European Ethnology at the Faculty of Arts of Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic. He has a Ph.D. degree in Ethnology (Masaryk University) and a master's degree in contemporary history and oral history (Charles University, Prague, CZ). In his professional and scientific work, he focuses on the border between ethnology and contemporary history, mainly using the oral history method. He focuses on the transformations of Czech society in the period of late socialism and post-socialism with an emphasis on studying and understanding the perspectives of people from non-privileged backgrounds, such as rural areas, and outskirts of towns. He is also interested in understanding recent history with regard to continuity and long-term processes in the form of research of social norms, values, and stereotypes shaping life strategies and thought patterns. His previous research has focused on social life in the Czech countryside during the socialist and post-socialist periods. Currently, he is the project partner in the Czech Science Foundation project Post-Socialist Transformation of Czech Primary Schools: Processes, Stories, Dilemmas (2020-2022). He has published one academic book and several studies in academic journals. He lectures on qualitative data analysis, oral history methodology, and rural change during socialism and post-socialism. He won an award from the Czech Ethnological Society for the best book of 2020.