In November U.S. Ambassador Ralph Johnson will visit the Orava Project in Dolný Kubín. He will be accompanied by Slovak State Secretary Nemčok. The purpose of the visit is to meet with the co-directors and participants to learn more about the Orava Project and its impact. The Ambassador who began his term as Ambassador in April, 1996 has stated his interest in learning more about the Orava Project. He has also expressed the desire to meet our Slovak partners to better understand their interests and needs. Also accompanying the Ambassador will be Pat Lerner, USAID Representative to Slovakia; Kathy Stermer, USAID Chief of Democratic Pluralism Division, and Ivona Fibingerová, assistant to Kathy Stermer.

Ambassador Johnson will spend one day in Dolný Kubín. His agenda will be full. He will begin with a meeting with project co-directors to be followed by a meeting with Orava regional project leaders including Mária Dudáková and several core teacher leaders. A luncheon will then be held with both school personnel and community leaders including Lord Mayor Ivan Budiak and the Regional District Director. 

Following this meeting the Ambassador and State Secretary will travel to Istebné to meet with participants in the educational leadership program. Rick Traw and Linda Fernandez will be conducting the School Improvement Planning course and will open their classroom to the visitors for discussion about the program. From Istebné the group will return to Dolný Kubín for a short meeting with parent, community and business leaders. The Orava region is an active economic region with numerous successes and persistent economic difficulties. Open discussion with business leaders and entrepreneurs is an important part of U.S. economic assistance to Slovakia.

The Ambassador’s visit will conclude with a dinner meeting at U Sovy. The Ambassador and State Secretary will participate in a debriefing of the day’s activities. A brief presentation and informal discussion will focus on future project initiatives.

USAID and the U.S. Embassy have been extremely supportive of the Orava Project. This visit will provide an opportunity to inform them in detail about the work being done in the Orava region. It is an excellent opportunity to showcase the wonderful work of the UNI educators who have participated and the hard work of our Slovak colleagues. It is difficult to get on the Ambassador’s schedule. The fact that he will spend an entire day focusing on the Orava Project is quite extraordinary. It will give us a remarkable opportunity to share with him ideas about the role of education in developing democracy and the power of educators to effect change.

Last spring the Slovak parliament passed a redistricting law which effectively tripled the number of regions in Slovakia. This law has had considerable impact on Slovakia and on those working with governmental organizations. This includes the Orava Project.

The impact is felt in two ways. First the law required that redistricting be in place by September 30 of this year. Because of a constitutional challenge and lack of advanced planning, the startup of reorganization did not begin until July. Consequently, the September 30 deadline brought more chaos than reorganization.

With redistricting to 87 regions new governmental offices, including the courts, police, social agencies, schools and other state offices are to be established in all the new regions. No new money was allocated, however, so the number of offices was tripled but the number of staff was drastically reduced. In many cases September 30 came with newly appointed staff working out of their homes because office space had not been secured. This occurred in Námestovo when the new regional school director and his staff had no office. With this situation coordination has been challenging. Thanks to Mária Dudáková, however, things in the region are functioning better than we might have expected.

The second impact of redistricting is bureaucratic. Orava was originally a single district but is now divided into three regions with centers in Dolný Kubín, Námestovo and Tvrdošín. On the positive side the newly appointed school directors and assistant directors are all quite supportive of the Orava Project. Three have been to UNI and the others are either involved in the Core Teacher Leader or Educational Leadership programs. However, future planning will be far more complicated. There will be more people involved and more paperwork. We will also have to be careful to respond uniformly to each region so no one area feels slighted. This takes time of course but with our new employee in Orava (to be hired soon) we should be able to get things done in a reasonably timely manner.

In September USAID procurement office signed an expansion and extension grant for the Orava Project. This grant is for slightly more than $ 2,000,000.00 and extends the project to June 30, 1999 bringing the total USAID grant to over $3 million dollars. This is the largest faculty grant to UNI faculty in UNI history.

With this grant the Orava Project will not only be extended in time but will also expand substantially. The grant will double the size of the project bringing the total full time staff to eleven and part time staff to ten.

Included in this staff will be two new U.S. based faculty members who will provide in-service programming to Slovak basic school teachers and university faculty. This staff will also manage a separate project office in Nitra (see New Classroom and Office Space).

Three primary goals now drive the expansion. First is to continue the various components of the project reaching out to more Slovak educators and involving more UNI and other U.S. based faculty. The second goal is to develop and implement strategies for dissemination of the project throughout the Slovak Republic with the intention to reach every basic school and university educator. The third goal is to institutionalize the various components of the project through incorporation of the various activities into Slovak education institutions including Ministry of Education activities, university courses and credits, certification procedures and other teacher pre-service and in-service educator programs.

With the extension and expansion grant we are confident the impact of the project will continue to grow. These are huge goals but obtainable ones if the project continues to have the same kind of success in the future experienced thus far.

Slovakia has become something of a film capital this past year. Last year the movie Dragon Heart was filmed in and around Bratislava and has now been released in the U.S. to somewhat mixed reviews. This year has seen a small explosion in film making here.

During the summer Bratislava’s Staré Mesto (Old Town) was transformed into two cities for the filming of “Peacemaker” starring Nicole Kidman and George Clooney. Michalská Ulica running from Michalská Brána (Michael’s Gate) to Panská (home of USAID offices) and right past our office was transformed into a Viennesse street. Street name signs were changed to German names and window ads were hung in German. Ulica became strasse and gasse overnight.

Turning the corner from Michalská and walking a short block up toward the castle the scene changed dramatically. The bustling, clean streets of Vienna gave way to a block of unreconstructed buildings which were transformed into Sarajevo, Bosnia. The contrast was stunning. Filming was also done in front of the U.S. embassy and opera house.

While filming for the “Peacemaker” was underway filming on two other movies was also moving forward. An elaborate mediaeval community was built of plaster and Styrofoam on the grounds of the Devín castle and filming of a third film, “Kull the Conqueror” (perhaps not destined to be a classic), was taking place on Koliba, the highest hill in Bratislava. Filming for these movies has also taken place in eastern Slovakia at Spišský hrad, a beautiful castle ruin near Slovenký Raj (Slovak Paradise), and in Košice.

Many people we know here have been involved in the filming in one way or another. Several USAID people were “caught” on film as extras and a friend has been working as a special effects assistant for one of the more imaginative films. It has been fascinating to observe the filming process especially a car crash scene involving two Mercedes crashing through a fake storefront in Staré Mesto. Oh, by the way, Tom Cruise came by one day to visit Nicole and smiled at Jeannie. He’s a bit toothy but cute. 

We plan to highlight a different component of the project in each newsletter. This issue focuses on the Early Childhood Component.

Orava Project’s Early Childhood Reflections
by Betty Zan

Fall of 1996 will be remembered as a time of tremendous growth for the Orava Project. On the heels of USAID’s expression of confidence, the project expanded to involve a new group of kindergarten teachers in Bratislava.

Under the leadership of Dr. Sona Kikušová of Comenius Unversity, a group of 20 kindergarten teachers from Bratislava District II began their work together by attending a one-day workshop on constructivist education with Dr. Rheta DeVries and Betty Zan from the Regents’ Center for Early Developmental Education at the University of Northern Iowa. Dr. DeVries is best known in the U.S. for her groundbreaking work on constructivist early education, and most recently for her writings (with Ms. Zan) on the constructivist sociomoral classroom atmosphere.

Dr. DeVries and Ms. Zan’s third visit to the Slovak Republic was perhaps their busiest. It began with a two-day workshop in Dolný Kubín for the grade 1-4 Core Teacher Leaders on how to create a democratic classroom atmosphere. Topics for discussion included involving students in making classroom rules and decisions, voting, resolving conflicts, and conducting sociomoral dilemma discussions.

After the workshop with the CTL group, DeVries and Zan spent two full mornings visiting two kindergarten classrooms in Orava taught by teachers with whom they have been working since 1994, and met with a group of kindergarten and early primary grade teachers in Orava to discuss their progress and problems implementing constructivist education. The teachers have devoted serious thought, hard work and tremendous commitment to the project. In the case of the elementary teachers, they appear to have transformed their   classrooms into places where children want to be. Eva Ferenčková, a teacher in Tvrdošín, reported that her second grade students do not want to leave at the end of the day, and often stay for an hour or more after school. She also stated that parents of her students tell her their children look forward to Monday, so that they can return to school.

This same teacher also described an integrated class project on fruits and vegetables in which the children took total responsibility for planning, designing and carrying out an exhibition on fruits and vegetables. Each student had an assigned task in presenting the exhibit, and they invited other classrooms to visit. The teacher reported with some surprise that the students even invited a class to visit at a time when she could not be present. They simply went about their assigned tasks, and conducted the visit quite well in her absence.

DeVries and Zan then traveled to Bratislava where they visited the kindergarten of the Pedagogical faculty in order to observe two kindergarten teachers with whom they have worked since 1994, and meet with a group of Bratislava kindergarten teachers working to implement constructivist education. They heard a kindergarten director describe her reaction to observing in the constructivist kindergarten — “When I walk into that class, I feel joy.”

After the one-day workshop with a new group of kindergarten teachers in Bratislava, the final two days of DeVries and Zan’s visit were spent in intense meetings with Drs.Sona Kikušová and Brano Pupala to discuss future collaborative research.

DeVries and Zan left the Slovak Republic with a deep sense of respect and admiration for their Slovak colleagues, and confidence that the project is thriving. The classroom visits demonstrated that children are making rules, discussing how they want their classrooms to be run and what they want to learn, voting, and grappling with issues of social and moral significance in their lives. In short, they are experiencing democracy first-hand.

Early Childhood Component Expands
The early childhood component coordinated by Dr. Rheta DeVries and Betsy Zan from UNI and Dr. Sona Kikušová and Dr. Brano Pupala from Comenius University has expanded considerably this year. The original program involved work with early childhood teachers in eight classrooms in a region surrounding Bratislava and eight classrooms in Orava. Work with these teachers has been intensive over the past two years and has been a model of school/university collaboration.

This year this component has expanded considerably and now includes an additional 20 teachers from District II in Bratislava. Dr. Sona Kikušová is coordinating this effort and has already begun in-service work with this group. In October DeVries and Zan also began work with this group as well as work with Core Teacher Leaders in Orava. The early childhood component fits especially well in the democratic context in the Orava Project and blends well with the work done with Core Teacher Leaders by Dr. Penny Beed in parent involvement and Dr. Sue Koch and Clare Struck in conflict resolution. This component involves some unique features which make it an excellent model of a scchool/university partnership. In addition to the collaborative structure established among the various university and school based faculty it also involves collaborative preparation of future teachers. This has been done through direct involvement of basic schools teachers in Comenius University early childhood classrooms as instructional resources but also via videotape. Participating in-service teachers are videotaping their classrooms and using these tapes for several purposes. They use them for self assessment, for the basis of discussions between university faculty and the teachers and as classroom instructional tools for preparing teachers.

This component of the Orava Project has been a success at numerous levels. It is thanks to the hard work of Rheta, Betsy, Sona and Brano and the many participating teachers.

It is important to pay tribute to the huge number of people who have contributed to the Orava Project as a way of expressing thanks to all within the UNI community who have worked for, supported and aided the Orava Project over the last three years. It is clear that without the tremendous support the extension grant would not have been possible. It is truly the result of the combined efforts of a vast number talented people. In fact the number is remarkable. Here is a listing of those who have come to Slovakia to work directly with our Slovak partners as well as those who have supported the project directly through their work in the education community stateside. We hope we have not omitted anyone. If so, please let us know.