Dr. Cecilia Policsek

This talk draws upon the centrality of the performance measurement to the recent educational schemes in Romania in order to map the major tensions that inform the Romanian academic landscapes nowadays in terms of the assessment of research and instruction quality. It does so by associating performance measurement to internationalization and foreign language teaching. Special attention is paid to the data gathered through interviews with important actors engaged in the educational process, in an attempt to find out the perceptions of the education professionals vis-à-vis the values that substantiate the concept of education, as shaped by the adoption of the performance measurements, as well as to detect the potential grounds on which resistance is being articulated. In a broader and implicit sense, the project is meant to illuminate areas of similitude or divergence with other countries in Central and Eastern Europe, in a more general effort to grasp by comparative means the national and regional response to the endorsement of the performance measuring logic.

Cecilia Policsek completed her Ph. D. at the University of Bergen. She holds a MA Degree in Latin American Studies from the University of Bergen. She studied in Norway, Spain, United States and Romania. Her research interests include Argentine literature, comparative approaches to the negotiation of memory through literature and curricula, with a special focus on the areas of encounter between Latin America and Eastern Europe, and foreign language teaching and intercultural education. She translated into Romanian works by Carlos Franz and Juan José Saer. She currently works as a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Modern Languages and Communication, Technical University of Cluj-Napoca.