Teacher Education in Adversity: Albania's Kualida Project, 1994-1998.

This paper focuses on the ongoing development of an inservice teacher education program for teachers in Albania following the downfall in the early 1990s of a repressive totalitarian regime. The Kualida project's name is an acronym based on the Albanian words for training, distance, and teachers and is very close in sound to the Albanian expression for quality. The project was one of the first initiatives to address the challenge of restructuring teacher education in that part of the world, and it remains unique in the southern Balkans in the way it utilizes open learning methodologies for inservice training. The first section of the paper examines research currently occurring regarding the history of teacher education in Albania and outlines the historical context in which the program is being developed. The second section presents the fieldwork and findings of the program evaluation, identifying three distinct but interwoven phases in the program: the context of criticism, the context of discovery, and the context of classroom practice. The paper concludes by formulating some key issues for those involved in the professional development of teachers through open learning. (Contains 32 references.) (SM)