Lugansk People’s Republic Ministry of Education and Science developed prototypes of new Ukrainian language and literature textbooks for all grades of the Republic’s comprehensive schools, an education official told a news briefing at Lugansk Media Centre on Tuesday.
“Since August 2015, in accordance with legal acts of the Education and Science Ministry new Ukrainian language and literature courses were approved for various levels of learning: basic, advanced and field-specific, for all grades,” acting director of the Research and Guidance Centre for Education Development Oksana Kolesnikova said.
Earlier, LPR head Igor Plotnitsky ordered the Centre to set up teachers’ creative teams to analyze the content of textbooks and draw up the list of textbooks recommended for the Republic’s educational institutions.
“Simultaneously, we began to develop new Ukrainian language and literature textbooks which had to comply with the programmes and new standards adopted in the Republic and setting requirements for a pupil’s progress in a discipline and personal advancement,” the Centre director said.
“I’m presenting the prototypes of these textbooks for the first time. Intermediate and senior grades will have format A5 black-and-white books, while grades 1-4 will have format A4 colour books, in line with sanitary and epidemiological norms,” she added.
The new textbooks update the pupils on the latest events in the history of the Lugansk region.
“We included materials on our native region, adding the so-called ‘regional component.’ These are stories about professions which are found in our region, such as coal-miner, texts on Lugansk as the Republic’s capital, and information about local nature. We updated the list of authors with such country fellows as Antonina Listopad and Vladimir Sosyura who earlier were missing on the list of authors of grade 5 textbooks for some reason,” Kolesnikova said.
“We tried to fill these textbooks with what we and our children care about and de-politicize them taking a step closer to the study of the beautiful Ukrainian language and literature,” she said.
According to the education official, new textbooks are not finalized yet.
"These are prototypes, and work on them will continue; it cannot be done in a day,” she said.
