Values, Imaginaries and Policy-Making for Teacher Education: insights from researching the Russian Federation context of reform, 2000-17 (original) (raw)
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In the past twenty years, Russian education has undergone transformations under the influence of global discourses. In this ethnographic study, I draw on Bakhtin’s (1981) theory of dialogue to examine how actors respond to these transformations. The purpose of my study is threefold: to document the emic perspectives on the changes, to reconstruct the implicit knowledge embedded in teacher education institutions, and to use that knowledge to challenge assumptions carried by global discourses. This study offers a new perspective on contradictions that global reforms evoke and calls for ground-up research that will use local categories to challenge global neoliberalism.
Teacher Education Reform as Political Theater: Modernization Dramas in the Russian Federation
In the last twenty years, many countries around the world embarked on reforming teacher education to make it more practice-oriented, skill-based, and school-focused. Reformers often draw on crisis narratives constructed with the help of international assessments, such as PISA or TIMSS, in order to adopt globally-circulated policy scripts. While these trends appear internationally with steady regularity, little attention has been paid to the actual processes that unfold when teacher education – long perceived as a nationally-oriented institution – becomes reoriented towards global designs. This dissertation attempts to fill this gap by using the lens of political theater to examine the processes of policy formation and contestation around teacher education modernization in the Russian Federation. In the fall of 2013 and spring of 2014, I conducted a multi-sited critical ethnography in three different cities in the Russian Federation. Located in these cities were a policy-making hub and two teacher education universities. My data sources included 70 interviews with various stake-holders, nine focus groups with teacher education students, and over 50 classroom observations. In addition to site research, I was a participant-observer in several academic and public events. I also collected archival documents, policy proposals, academic publications, and mass media materials that focus on teacher education reforms during the Soviet and post-Soviet eras. The conceptual framework of political theater used in this dissertation is based on the theories of performance (Goffman 1974, 1959), social drama (Turner 1974), political spectacle (Debord 1994; Edelman 1988), and theater (Boal 1979). This framework is helpful for revealing what is made (in)visible for the audience during the staging of a modernization drama that seeks to introduce social change through teacher education reforms. I explore how policy-makers employ role-reshuffling to disguise who directs reform processes; how masks are used to cover policy’s intended outcomes; how selective focus draws the audience’s attention towards “low quality” teacher education and away from the social change desired by the private sector. I also trace the role of international scripts, such as the McKinsey report (Barber and Mourshed 2007), in reformers’ production and examine the performances that occur within pedagogical universities that are the target of the current reforms. Ultimately, I show that the preponderance of imitation and profanation at educational institutions make unlikely the social change desired by the reformers and the private sector. The significance of this study lies in offering new lens through which to examine teacher education reforms. The conceptual framework of political theater disrupts assumptions about policy-making processes and their likely outcomes. It also affords opportunities to examine policy texts and policy actors’ performances along political, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions. Overall, the modernization dramas unfolding in the Russian Federation raise questions about the future of teacher education in Russia and in other contexts.
TEACHER ROLES FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF CHANGING HIGHER EDUCATION ENVIRONMENT IN RUSSIA
The evolving nature of modern Russian education attempting to adapt the best European educational practices and to maintain its own has led to reexamining the roles English teachers perform in the classroom. The article analyses the two approaches and discusses their correlation. Even though both perceptions seem to be based on comparatively similar assumptions, the article reveals a more general character of the Russian methodology approach, and a more functional nature of the European approach. Educated in Russian traditional methodology, teachers struggle to fulfil the current performance requirements, respond to the considerable underlying challenges, and have to find and maintain the balance between the Russian traditional and European patterns of classroom behaviour. While their choice is normally based on the state-of-the-art concepts, it apparently does not often result in modifying their own teaching practices. The article may give education administrators and teacher trainers some useful insights to help them reshape teacher training procedures and methodology.
International Review of Education, 2008
The purpose of this study is to explore teacher education policies in different countries of Latin America and North America through the comparison of policy documents. The training of teachers, a key component of education, faces educational challenges as a result of various reform policies in different countries. Critical discourse analysis offers the possibility of illuminating certain aspects of educational policies in specific historic moments. A comparative perspective allows researchers to explore similarities and differences between political statements from a number of governments and agencies, in order to characterize general elements and particularities of teacher education policies in the context of late capitalism. The corpus of this study consists of a selection of recent educational policy documents at national and international levels. This study continues a line of previous studies which apply critical discourse analysis to the research of educational policies.
RUSSIA: AN INCESSANT BATTLE FOR EDUCATION
Historia i Polityka, 2018
The presented paper discusses the changes in the Russian education system that took place in the years 2013–2016, during the presidency of Vladimir Putin. The analysis encompasses all dimensions of changes in the education system: personnel changes (replacement of Dmitri Livanov by Olga Vasil’eva in the position of the RF Minister of Education and Science), formal ones (development of the new: Concept of a new educational – methodological complex for teaching national history), institutional (reform of the Russian Academy of Sciences) and finally also qualitative changes (introduction of new history textbooks). The article attempts to show that the above changes are in fact manifestations of tightening state control over education and its treatment as a vehicle to create the historical policy of the Russian Federation.
Europe-Asia Studies, 2018
In 2010, Russian authorities presented a new draft law on education, which immediately became controversial. The essay examines whether user groups (parents) and low-ranking sector employees (teachers) were active in the movement critical of the reform, and how the state responded to the anti-reform movement. The movement consisted of several networks and organisations with no central node. It included teachers, parents and activists from both non-systemic groups and systemic opposition parties. Pressure from below by networks and organisations was combined with pressure from actors situated above in the political system, that is, in the Duma. Since the movement was welfare-oriented rather than fundamentally regime-critical, the Russian authorities tolerated open criticism both from civil society and inside the Duma. Some gains for teachers were won, but the movement's proposed amendments and demands were generally rejected or only introduced in revised form. THIS ESSAY DESCRIBES A POLITICAL MOVEMENT AGAINST reform in the Russian welfare policy sector, more precisely, the reforms in the education sector proposed by the Ministry of Education in 2010 and passed by the Duma in 2012. It aims to shed light on the following two questions. First, which groups were the driving forces in the movement? In particular, were user groups (parents) and low-ranking employees of the policy sector undergoing reform (teachers) active in it? Second, how did Russian authorities respond to the movement? Was it treated as dissent and resisted, or as a form of contention to be tolerated, even accommodated? While the movement targeted both the general and the higher sectors of education, this essay focuses on the general education sector. 1 The essay will first discuss some key theoretical concepts, discuss educational reform and protest in 2010-2012, and describe the methodological approach taken in this study. Following this, the build-up and manifestations of protest activity and criticism will be presented chronologically. The conclusion returns to the research questions and discusses the implications of the findings.
Comparative Education , 2020
International organisations facilitated the spread of competencybased reforms around the world. Accepting at face value correlations between students' performance on international assessments, such as PISA, and nations' economic development, reformers in different countries began to adopt competencybased standards to improve the quality of education. Hybridising competency discourses circulated by international organisations, Russian reformers introduced new school standards that created a bifurcation of the educational system along the lines of socioeconomic, cultural, and linguistic diversity. This bifurcation is evident in the standards' focus on providing in-depth disciplinary knowledge to students from privileged backgrounds and competencies 'to adapt to the world' to students from underserved groups. The significance of this analysis lies in demonstrating how appropriations and hybridisations of competency discourses in the Russian Federation work to produce elites that govern and workers who accept low positions in social hierarchies of the neoliberal world order.
Universal principles transform national priorities: Bologna Process and Russian teacher education
Teaching and Teacher Education, 2014
h i g h l i g h t s I analyzed teacher education curriculum and educational policy documents. I juxtaposed the dominant themes before and after neoliberal reforms. I showed the changes in the approaches and program structures. Changes include de-professionalization, fragmentation, and individualism. These changes have significant social and cultural consequences.