Evaluating the Impact of Restructuring Secondary Education in East Timor

Abstract

The Timorese Government has embarked upon several approaches to empower national education, namely through the restructuring of the secondary education. Due to the lack of skilled professionals in education, East Timor has resorted to the support of international cooperation with institutions such as the University of Aveiro, in Portugal. In this paper, we present a starting project that aims at investigating how the new curriculum of secondary education in East Timor is being implemented, through its monitoring and short-term exploratory evaluation. At its core, this project seeks to provide constructive feedback both to the authors of the curriculum, as well as to Timorese stakeholders. Furthermore, this project constitutes a unique opportunity to closely follow, in the context of international cooperation, the process of the restructuring of an education system in a developing country, boosting the relationships between the researchers, the authors of the restructuring and the Timorese stakeholders.