Historic and Cultural Transformation of an Educational Institution: The Workers Faculties in Vietnam, Cuba and Mozambique. Globalization of an Educational Idea

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Ingrid Miethe
• Subject Area: General Education and History of Education
• Term: from 2013 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 236183563

The proposal for continued funding results on one hand from findings reaching beyond the initial project proposal, and on the other hand from difficulties in access to archives as well as from the need for the analysis of additional archival records. The last point especially concerns the Vietnam case study, for which important theses of the study cannot adequately be pursued without these sources. The findings reaching beyond the initial project proposal show that Workers Faculties transfer processes were considerably more complex than originally assumed. Not only the German Democratic Republic and the Soviet Union, but also the Peoples Republic of China, were involved in these transfers as lending countries. Contrary to previous assumptions it is not possible to reconstruct the Chinese Workers Faculty system based on English language literature alone because of the complexity and diverse modifications it underwent. This necessitates a systematic analysis of the extensive Chinese language literature already compiled. Additionally, it became clear that not only transfer processes between European countries on the one hand and countries in Asia, Africa as well as in Latin America on the other were of importance for the international spread of Workers Faculties, but that south-south cooperation also played a role (Cuba to Nicaragua, Mozambique; Vietnam to Laos, Cambodia). South-south cooperation therefore turned out to be of highest importance for the assessment of the overall research topic, and shall be investigated based on the example of Workers Faculty transfer from Cuba to Nicaragua. The projects findings shall be theoretically linked to globalization discourses. The initial project found that the Soviet Rabfak (raboij fakutet, Workers Faculty) model merely served as one possibility available to the researched countries that was drawn on when deemed a suitable solution for prevailing local problems. Despite this strong local persistence, the global spread of Workers Faculties can be understood as one specific form of Soviet (Boden 2013; Sanchez-Sibony 2014) or socialist (Aust 2013) globalization. Additional countries shall be included in the comparison to focus this hypothesis. To this end, Workers Faculties in the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea have already been investigated. Contrasting cases of incompletely implemented transfers shall be provided by research at the German Federal Archives and the German Federal Foreign Offices Political Archive on Workers Faculties in Afghanistan, Yemen, as well as Ethiopia and Angola. The comprehensive investigation of the global spread of Workers Faculties and the theoretical linking to globalization discourses aim at using the example of Workers Faculties transfers to develop a theoretical approach for grasping socialist globalization in the field of education.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants