What is IMANARE ?
IMANARE (lmplicit Anthropology of Reforms in Education) is an Erasmus+ KA220-HED project (Cooperation Partnerships in Higher Education), funded under the 2024 Round 1 call in Slovakia. The project officially started in May 2025 and will run for a total of 27 months, concluding in July 2027. The project aims to explore the implicit assumptions and underlying anthropology of educational reforms, with the goal of promoting reflective, human-centered policies and practices that give meaning and purpose to learning.
IMANARE develops theoretical models, observation tools, databases, training modules, and applied educational resources to analyze and understand reforms in different educational contexts. By combining rigorous academic research with practical applications, the project seeks to provide policymakers, educators, and researchers with actionable insights into the goals, values, and impacts of educational reforms.
The project fosters collaboration across universities, research centers, and educational institutions, ensuring broad dissemination and stakeholder engagement. IMANARE’s outputs include scientific publications, policy briefs, online databases, training programs, summer schools, and public outreach initiatives, all aimed at enhancing knowledge and reflection on educational change worldwide.
The project brings together four organisations from four
European countries :
- Matej Bel University (Slovakia)
- University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Theology Slovenia)
- Udruga Mala Filozofija (Croatia)
- The European Comittee for Catholic Education– CEEC (Belgium)
The project is structured into four Work Packages
1.
Project Management
This package ensures smooth implementation of the project through the coordination of administrative, financial, and reporting tasks, fostering effective collaboration among all partners.
2.
Academic Framework
This package forms the theoretical and conceptual core of the project. It includes a comprehensive literature review, development of a theoretical model, and an anthropology-based observation tool to analyze educational reforms.
3.
Practical Applications
This package translates theory into practice through tools, databases, and educational resources. Key activities include analysis of reform documents, creation of an online reforms database, an online training module, a summer school, and a video documentary.
4.
Dissemination and Broader Impact
This package focuses on communication, dissemination, and stakeholder engagement. It includes visibility materials, newsletters, public outreach, and scientific dissemination via articles, policy briefs, and a final white paper, supported by an international conference.
Work package 3 operationalises the insights developed in work package 2, translating theoretical concepts into usable research tools and educational resources. The core activity of this work package is the application of the IMANARE Observational Metric to a curated set of national reform documents.
Beyond document analysis, work package 3 also includes the development of several public-facing outputs. These include a searchable online reform database, an online training course (MOOC) aimed at pedagogy and education policy students, and the organisation of a summer school to promote dialogue between future educators and researchers. Finally, work package 3 will also lead the production of a documentary, designed to communicate the core ideas of the project to a wider audience – including you, the recipient of this newsletter.
The Core of It
Though we realise that the more technical work packages for management and dissemination are important, we need to admit that the theoretical framework and practical applications are the core of the IMANARE project. We do want to underline that the dissemination (including building up a network – among other things also through this newsletter) is something we approach very seriously and with much interest.
We aim for real scientific impact both through the publication strategy and the final project conference. However, the research and tools will be developed in work packages 2 and 3. Work Package 2 establishes the theoretical backbone of the IMANARE project. lt focuses on identifying and analysing the implicit anthropological assumptions embedded in European educational reforms. The work begins with a structured literature review, distributed across four thematic areas: anthropology of education, reform discourse, the role of relationships in education, and existing observational tools.
Based on this foundation,
work package 2 also includes the development of the IMANARE Observational Metric – a conceptual tool designed to support hermeneutic analysis of reform documents. The metric is structured around five interpretive demains: knowledge, skills, character, community, and values. These demains enable researchers to examine not only what educational reforms say, but what they reveal about the image of the human being they presuppose. Work package 2 thus bridges academic theory with practical inquiry by producing a shared framework for all subsequent stages of the project.
