Nov. 11, 2003

ISU professor trains police trainers in Kosovo

Hofmeister, a professor in Indiana State University’s School of Education, spent most of the month of October at the Kosovo Police Service School as part of the United Nations’ Mission in Kosovo and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

The mission is devoted to rebuilding the war-ravaged province, transforming the former communist state into an autonomous democracy. A major part of that mission is to maintain civil law and order through a democratic police force.

“As (the United Nations) continues to engage in nation-building, one of the early activities is law and order. And law and order, of course, is maintained by a democratic police force,” Hofmeister said. “It’s very important to stress that it’s a democratic police form, because these are countries that have experienced totalitarianism or dictatorships… They’re trying to shift into a democratic state and that means police act differently.”

Three days into Hofmeister’s second week of training, a Bosnian student was banned from attending the training sessions by his supervisor.

"The police felt badly for him,” Hofmeister said. “They felt that an injustice had been done. It was a white elephant in the room at that time. Was the injustice done because the guy was Bosnian or was there some other reason? Nobody ever really expressed that, but those issues did exist.”

But for the most part, Hofmeister said, Kosovo police are adapting well to their new role as unbiased protectors of the peace. “I think the police, of their own merit, tend to look at people pretty equally, as equally as they can,” he said.

As chair of ISU’s Curriculum, Instruction and Media Technology program, Hofmeister had no previous police experience or experience in teaching police instructors. He was brought in to make the police trainers better teachers.

“A lot of police officer trainers have never had training in how to train,” he said. “They’ve just picked it up over time; it’s something they’ve liked and have gotten to be good at it with practice.”

So Hofmeister worked on helping the police trainers understand the learning process.

He communicated to the class through an Albanian translator. A Serbian speaker was made available for the few Serbian students.

Much of the curriculum for the week-long courses was formed on the fly. After conducting a goal analysis survey a half hour into the first session, Hofmeister discovered the course curriculum he had constructed, brought with him and had translated wasn’t material the class needed to cover.

“Recognizing a couple things coming out fairly early on it was evident that the population of police officers that was drawn to that class was not what (organizers had expected),” Hofmeister said. “What I had planned would be OK, but it wouldn’t really address their needs. And so it just began to drift in a manner in which they were setting what needed to be learned.”

So he rewrote materials more specific to the classroom needs.

Like Hofmeister himself, his methods of teaching were foreign to many of the students.

“They had spent a fair amount of time under the communist system,” he said. “Their understanding of education is you start at the beginning and you work your way through.

“They spent a lot of time quibbling about words rather than concepts,” he added. “And so the issues for them became which specific words were being used to connote (a concept) to make as perfect sense as possible rather than trying to deal with the issues of, What is the concept, and what are the elements of the concept that we need to make sure is being learned, and how do we determine that that has been learned?”

Hofmeister did little sight-seeing.

“As a lone person in another nation, the OCSE materials encouraged not traveling alone,” he said. “It’s still considered a high-risk area.”

So Hofmeister spent much of his time away from the class preparing for the next day’s sessions and keeping up on his duties for Indiana State.

The banned Bosnian student aside, Hofmeister saw more first-hand remnants of the old Kosovo regime.

Hofmeister was housed with a family who had escaped the ethnic warfare of the mid-1990s and returned after the U.N. had stepped in to resolve the conflict. The man was a watchmaker and had fled with the family to Amsterdam in 1992 after their home was attacked by Serbs. They returned to Kosovo in 2000 to begin rebuilding their home.

On one wall of the home was a clock, blackened by fire during the attack on their home in 1992.

“We were working in a post-war environment where by legislative fiat they’ve said everybody is equal,” Hofmeister said. “And the police are quick to point out we’re all equal here. But if you look at the actual functionality of minorities within that population, it’s not equal. How do you work in an environment where clearly prejudice exists, but yet it’s being denied? So there are some complexities there about how you overcome that.”

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Contact:
David Hofmiester, chair, Curriculum, Instruction and Media Technology,
(812) 237-2960 or eshofmei@isugw.indstate.edu

Writer:
Mark Gibson, ISU Public Affairs, (812) 237-3790 or devgibso@isugw.indstate.edu

ISU Public Affairs:
(812) 237-3773 or http://isunews.indstate.edu