European transformation of higher education in Ukraine – an opinion translated into action: the case for Computational Linguistics at Kyiv National Linguistic University

Abstract

In this paper, we show how the new educational value is created and managed at Kyiv National Linguistic University taking its strategic direction towards the transformation that the higher education of Ukraine begins to undergo in its harmonization with that of Europe, in the face of the grand challenges and in response to the grand changes that are now revamping Ukraine and the world.
We seek to add an interpretive depth to the concept of transformation by particularizing that this must necessarily be a change in the content, rather than merely a change in the form, which generally is the case with metamorphoses, when it is an input to the content that causes the form to change. To this end, we document the onset and the stage-by-stage development of an academic course in Computational Linguistics that in its evolution migrated from the periphery to the core of the educational program it is part of, creating a sustainable European educational culture in the educational space of the University.
We give a comprehensive account of our concerted educational action in launching the course, and unpack our understanding of how exactly the course contributes to the professional and personal transformation of its students, on the one hand, and to the big transformation of higher education in Ukraine, on the other. We show that our action was informed by our educational praxis with which we continuously engaged in making the artifacts constitutive of the culture: the educational materials that
we developed, and the pedagogical and psychological choices that we made when tailoring particular learning experiences for the students. All these in a tandem form our educational practice that we in this paper specify as one endowed with a European spirit. This practice is the input that we prove was transformative throughout the educational change.
The course in Computational Linguistics at Kyiv National Linguistic University ensures the quality of higher education according to European standards, contributing to the national repute and internationalization of the University.