More than 500 teachers and teaching assistants from Ukraine now work in Lithuania’s schools. With schools struggling to find staff, they welcome Ukrainian specialists who teach foreign languages and sciences to Lithuanian-speaking students.
Viktoria Synychych from Ukraine has been teaching English to primary and secondary school students at Kaunas International Gymnasium for two years now. She has also worked as a teacher in her home country. The first lessons in a Lithuanian classroom were tough, she says, but she coped with the challenges.
“Lithuanian is a very difficult language and I know it is my duty to learn Lithuanian. Schools are similar everywhere – there’s a classroom, there are students, I love my job, it’s easy,” shares Synychych.
She is not the only Ukrainian teacher in this particular school in Lithuania’s second biggest city.
“There are 11 Ukrainian teachers and assistants in our gymnasium. We have two English language specialists, we have a special educator, we have assistants, and we have a hygiene specialist,” says Erikas Griškevičius, the headmaster of Kaunas International Gymnasium which instructs in Lithuanian and Russian.
Kateryna Sylchenkova from Ukraine is also an English teacher, working at another Kaunas school, the Saulės Gymnasium. The school’s headmistress says that she is substituting for a teacher who is on maternity leave, but the school would like to keep Sylchenkova permanently.
“Our decision [to hire a Ukrainian teacher] has paid off 100 percent, multiple graduates received top marks in their exams and we have never heard any complaints from the children, they are all very satisfied,” says Sonata Drazdavičienė, the headmistress of the Saulė Gymnasium.
Sylchenkova, who came to Lithuania with her son after Russia invaded her country, admires the willingness of Lithuanian students to study. She admits that some of her students did not even realise she was Ukrainian and were surprised upon learning it.
“I only speak English in class, and students understand when I give them vocabulary, grammar, language exercises. If there is a word they don’t know, we look for synonyms or ways to explain the word in English. There are no problems,” says the teacher.
Two dozen teachers from Ukraine work in Kaunas schools. Most of them teach English, Russian and Spanish, and a few teach mathematics and computer science.
“There are some very talented teachers who have worked as teachers in universities and who teach English. We also have some who have worked as teachers at the Kharkiv Lyceum of Exact Sciences. They are really excellent teachers, and we are glad that, amid a shortage of teachers, they can make up for it,” says Ona Gucevičienė, head of the Kaunas Municipality Education Department.
Lina Kaminskienė, chancellor of the Academy of Education of Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, says that eleven Ukrainians have chosen to study Primary Education Pedagogy and Early Foreign Language Teaching.
“This first group is our first test case. I can see that there is a growing interest [to study teaching] not only from the young Ukrainians here in Lithuania, who are graduating from Lithuanian schools this year, but also from those who are currently in Ukraine,” she says.
According to the Ministry of Education, Science and Sport, there are currently over 500 teachers and teaching assistants from Ukraine working in general education schools across the country.
Kaminskienė believes that more of them will be employed in the future.
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