Sergey Kosaretsky

The IV International Scientific Conference "Interaction. Integration. Inclusion: labyrinths of meanings and horizons of possibilities" has recently concluded. This year, 17 sections and a round table meeting were organized, which brought together more than 400 participants interested in the study and development of socio-cultural integration from different countries and regions of Russia.

At the BRICS Civil Society Forum, leaders of non-profit organizations and experts discussed the future of education in their countries. Experts from the Institute of Education actively participated in the forum. The meeting led to a number of suggestions for deepening cooperation in this field.

On July 3–4, 2024, the IX BRICS Civil Forum was held in Moscow for the first time since the association was expanded by five new countries in January 2024. Participants emphasised the importance of personal interaction between public figures, civil activists, as well as the work they do to strengthen and enrich friendly relations between BRICS countries, based on mutual respect. The forum was organised by the BRICS Expert Council–Russia, which is established at the HSE University.

In March 2024, researches of the Institute of Education visited leading universities in Beijing, China, to strengthen established ties and deepen research cooperation. As part of their visit, scholars shared their research results and gave guest lectures.

The staff of our Laboratory and the Pinsky Centre of General and Extracurricular Education of the HSE University won the competition of the Russian Science Foundation "Conducting fundamental scientific research and exploratory scientific research by small individual scientific groups" (regional competition).

COVID-19 has had a swift and ubiquitously profound social impact arguably unseen at any other point of crisis in recent history. As the pandemic marched on, Russian education experienced a hard time settling into the new lay of the land with COVID-induced disruptions defying much of the system’s common norms, standards, and practices.

Anastasia Andreeva, Diana Koroleva, Sergei Kosaretsky, and Isaak Frumin have embarked on a research journey to explore how various stakeholders in Russian K—11 education interacted amid a tapestry of centrifugal and centripetal winds stirred by COVID-19. A chapter summarizing the study findings has been published in Springer’s Schools and Society During the COVID-19 Pandemic: How Education Systems Changed and the Road Ahead.

‘Primary and Secondary Education during COVID-19,’ an international volume recently published in open access by Springer, shares accounts by research teams from over a dozen countries of how systems of general education in these respective nations have been steering through a challenging environment of the COVID pandemic.

Understanding the role of children’s interactive environments that blend learning and entertainment in modern-day educational ecosystems.

On May 21, the joint webinar series, ‘Education under COVID-19: Problems, Solutions, Perspectives, Research’ began with a session about the effects of school closures under the pandemic. Harry Anthony Patrinos of the World Bank presented the results of a model that he and a team of researchers developed in order to predict the extent to which the closures may reduce learning and lead to future losses in labor productivity and earnings for today’s students. The webinar was moderated by Isak Froumin (Head of the HSE Institute of Education), while Professors Tommaso Agasisti (School of Management, Politecnico di Milano) and Sergey Kosaretsky (Director, HSE Centre of General and Extracurricular Education) served as discussants.

Experts at the HSE Laboratory for Media Communications in Education have come up with findings from a large-scale survey they have conducted in association with the HSE Institute of Education, which aimed to gauge how well school teachers have been able to transition online amid Covid-19 directives that have temporarily shut down conventional learning. In all, 22,600 teachers from 73 Russian regions have been interviewed. The results propose that the overall assessment of how comfortable the Russian teacher corps have found themselves taking instruction to the digital dimension is more optimistic than what was first thought back to when schools had just set about moving online.

A large-scale study conducted by the HSE Laboratory for Media Communications in Education found that the situation with online education is better than was first thought when schools had to switch to Internet-based learning to help stop the spread of coronavirus infections.

Schoolchildren in many countries, including Russia, are now studying remotely. Russia’s first social impact project in education, in which over 5,000 students and 700 teachers from 27 schools of the Khangalassky District of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) are participating, is also transitioning to an online format. The transition will be overseen by the project creators—Project Office staff members of HSE’s Institute of Education.

Earlier this fall, Stockholm, Sweden welcomed educational researchers, strategists and institutional leaders from across the globe for the Second WERA-IRN Conference on ‘Extended Education,’ a dimension of learning & development that embraces a vast array of practices and activities beyond the general curriculum that unfold both within and outside the regular school perimeter. IOE experts Sergey Kosaretsky and Mikhail Goshin took part in the forum to present about how different strategies of parental involvement in formal schooling impact the odds of children’s success in extracurriculars.

How to Prevent Underachievement at School

In November, IOE welcomed a cohort of top-notch law & policy experts from the U.S., Russia, Poland, Belgium, South Africa and Germany for the first international conference, ‘Multi-level Governance in Education: Top-down Governance, Transfer of Authority, and Regional Cooperation.’ A joint initiative between IOE and the ‘EduLaw’ (Erasmus+ Mundus – Curriculum Development) project, the event featured multi-prism debate about how more justified central–local power schemas in education can be devised as an important condition for shaping more effective, equity-centric L&D environments.

The conference was organized by the Centre for Education Law of the Institute of Education of the "Higher School of Economics" with the participation of the International Project "EduLaw" (Erasmus + Mundus - Curriculum Development)

Topics of resilient schools and how such L&D settings can be best created to empower less privileged student cohorts have recently piqued more interest among educational scholars and within broader public realms. Marina Pinskaya, Sergey Kosaretsky, Roman Zvyagintsev and Mikhail Goshin, experts at the IOE Center for Socioeconomic Aspects of Schooling, traveled to Italy’s Bolzano this September to take part in the 2018 ECER International Conference, where they presented about IOE’s research on resilient K-11 settings.

This September, a Memorandum of Cooperation was signed between IOE and GlobalLab, a Russian-based venue for schoolers and teachers from across the globe to build L&D networks and collaborate on various educational and research projects online.

The Institute of Education at HSE has signed an agreement outlining collaboration with the online platform, GlobalLab - a community of teachers and students who work on joint research projects over the Internet.

On August 3–5, South Africa’s Cape Town welcomed over 500 leading academics from 62 countries for the 2018 Global Congress of World Education Research Association (WERA), the largest international venue for multidisciplinary educational scholarship and networking. IOE researchers Pavel Sorokin, Sergey Kosaretsky and Roman Zvyagintsev were also presenting at this year’s WERA event.

According to the decision of Sergey Sobyanin, Mayor of Moscow, fourteen HSE staff members were officially recognised by Moscow Government, with the awards being timed to coincide with the 25^th anniversary of the university.

The HSE Institute of Education has become a founding partner of the Institute for Global Educational Opportunity, an association of universities and research centres that study educational inequality. Representatives from Russia, the U.S., Germany, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Chili gathered in Washington to reach an agreement on joint annual conferences, publications, and research.

hours are spent each week on courses, clubs, workshops and lessons with tutors by primary- and secondary-school students who are involved in supplementary education.