Implementation

In addition to the official inauguration and signature ceremony, the June Jahorina meeting provided time for the first working session of the SMS members. Working groups for the five main themes, with 20 to 30 people in each group, met to discuss their issue areas together with national and international facilitators, and develop a

133 _{Personal interview, Hugh Glanville, Sarajevo, November 2002.}

134 _{Representative organizations included the EC, UNESCO, UNICEF, World Bank, OHR, COE, the}

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SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis. Facilitators were considered to be a key element of the effort to ensure full local ownership and partici- pation, and a group of national and international facilitators received basic training, which was later supplemented by more intensive facilitation skills training seminars. Facilitators were utilized to encourage brainstorming, focus discussions, mediate problems or debates and help groups to develop focused action-oriented tasks.

This meeting provided a first look at some of the challenges the project coordinators and participants faced. For example, while the five noted sub-committees facilitated the organized breakdown into working groups, the amount of overlap among the top- ics became clear from the start. Inclusive and special needs education and curriculum framework development would be affected by teacher training progress, educational management and teacher training would also be linked and everything would be af- fected by the results of legal and support system reform. Progress in one group would aid progress in another and difficulties in one group could reverberate and potentially impede progress in the others.

A post-conference debriefing of the working group facilitators revealed both positive and negative comments, as well as additional challenges:

What some facilitators did not like about the groups was that listening to each other was a problem, discussion should have been shorter, political issues ob- structed productive work, and positions from the Republika Srpska were rigid. One of the groups was said to be divided in opinion, with huge differences be- tween Entity representatives. For some facilitators the unfamiliar methods were obstacles.135

Participatory and cooperative working methods were new to the participants and led to difficulties with basic workshop processes such as brainstorming.

The political and legal obstacles to effective implementation of technical reform also became clear from this inaugural meeting. In a very honest epilogue to the conference

135 _{A Shared Strategy for the Modernization of Primary and General Secondary Education in BiH,}

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report, Paul Roeders addressed the difficulties of moving forward with technical re- form in the absence of a suitable political environment and legal framework:

If this signifies that the modernization process of the education system has to be within the limits of the present laws in BiH, it is not an element to be taken into account, but a lethal threat to the process. In a democratic society, the law should be adapted to new, required developments in the systems that together form the society, and not the other way around…..If the SMS has to limit itself to stay within the limits of the present legal system, we better don’t start the process at all, because it will never achieve its major objective.136

A ‘chicken and egg’ scenario, in which technical solutions might not be proposed without confirmation of a legal framework and legal solutions might not be proposed based on needed reforms due to political imperatives, would often result in stalemate, particularly in terms of the detailed, implementation-oriented suggestions envisioned for the effort.

From November 2001 through June 2002, a total of six multi-day SMS workshops were held to define goals, suggest strategies and develop plans for implementation.137 The plan was for all of this input and feedback to be developed into a final report of recommendations to be handed to the Entity MOEs for review and implementation. Over 100 working group participants from throughout BiH (including Brčko) were included among 12 working groups comprised of teachers, experts employed by the Entity or Cantonal Ministries of Education, Pedagogical Institutes, Faculties, Teach- ers’ Unions, Institutes for Special Education and others.138

The EC-TAER SMS organizers charged with implementing this project wanted to ensure that the education ministers and authorities had full buy-in to, and ownership of the process to minimize potential obstruction or difficulties as the project pro- gressed. In addition, this would ensure that the final results and recommendations were seen as the product of work by BiH experts, rather than externally imposed ideas. Therefore, selection of SMS project participants was an important first step.

136

Ibid, 22.

137 _{The meetings were held in Neum (13-16 November 2001), Teslić (18-21 February 2002), Ilidza (13-}

16 March 2002), Banja Luka (21-24 April 2002), Teslić (22-25 May 2002), and Tuzla (15-18 June 2002).

138

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The organizers had originally envisioned a participant selection process in which it would receive and review applications for working group members submitted by the professionals themselves (teachers, educational administrators, pedagogues, etc.) and then pass a list of recommended candidates to the Entity Ministries for review, com- ment and acceptance. Formal approval of the working group members by the Minis- tries was assumed to be a way of ensuring that working group members could partici- pate and make decisions with the backing and support of the Ministries that would ultimately implement these ideas.

Ultimately, however, the MOEs insisted on a procedure whereby they simply ap- pointed individuals for working group participation and EC-TAER was not in a posi- tion to challenge this demand. The appointment process was slow and driven by BiH politics, and the 12 working groups were not finally developed until October 2001. The selection procedure, unlike an application approach, also eliminated the quality controls of a more stringent screening process and made it less likely that profession- als interested in applying to participate, yet not politically connected, would be se- lected.

The six workshops were well executed and provide a useful case study in workshop facilitation and encouraging local ownership of processes and methods, but they failed to have the desired results due to a lack of political will. The workshop environment included a mix of large and small group work, with small group work led by recently trained local facilitators. International and Bosnian experts presented working papers to guide the discussions of each of the five key areas. Study visits to Hungary, Slove- nia and Romania provided first-hand experience and observation of best practices. Each workshop was structured according to daily goals outlined in worksheets and matrices, which the working group participants would work on together in order to develop ideas on paper, finalize them on computer and distribute this work to the five thematic sections for review, approval and adoption. Evaluations of each workshop ensured space for feedback and helped guide changes for subsequent meetings. How- ever, in spite of this work plan and approach - something critical was missing.

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