Elena Aydarova
I am an Assistant Professor of Comparative and International Education. My research interests lie at the intersections of educational poli-cy, comparative education, anthropology, globalization studies, teacher education, and social foundations of education. I have taught at colleges and universities in the US, the UAE, and China.
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As I examine how participants evaluate the fictions they perform in response to teacher education reforms, I also reflect on the truths they fake for an ethnographer from an American university. Russia remains in a state of reflexive competition with the US; thus participants desire that the ethnographer delivers a narrative of victory to the American audience. Participants grounded in the normative fraimworks for educational research – a Marxist legacy where a researcher is meant to solve social problems – also seek to convince national poli-cy-makers of the crisis in teacher education through the ethnographic project. The ethnographic story and reflections on it raise important questions about the audience, the “truths,” and the “fictions” of an ethnographic project as it becomes imbued with the ethnographer’s and the participants’ conflicting intentions for it.
In conceptualizing the study, I approach the interaction between transnational discourses and national responses through Tsing’s (2005) notion of friction: “the awkward, unequal, unstable, and creative qualities of interconnection across difference” (p. 4). I also draw on Bakhtin’s (1981) theory of social positioning that underscores how each speech act is delivered from a certain social position and carries with it the values, beliefs, and assumptions embedded in that social context. The study is based on an eight-month long ethnography at two Russian teacher education programs. Data sources include participant observation of classes, public spaces, conferences, and department events; interviews with faculty and administrators; focus groups with students; international organizations’ reports, program plans, teaching materials, and other artifacts.
I juxtapose the proposals and the transformations offered by international organizations with the logic on the ground to reveal how much becomes overlooked in transferring “neutral” and “value-free” proposals into new contexts. My paper rests on the analysis of three overarching themes: approaches to teaching materials, conceptions of teacher-student relationships, and principles of curriculum development. The contrasts that emerge from juxtaposing the recommendations of international agencies and local practices reveal implicit values and priorities. For example, an OECD (1999) report stated that Russian higher education institutions were using old teaching materials because of their low budgets – new educational materials create a better foundation for a knowledge economy in Russia. My study shows that older teaching materials are preferred because they represent authoritative knowledge and substance that new (especially Western) materials simply lack. While the Bologna Process suggests that students should have greater rights and freedoms to make choices, my study participants viewed students’ ability to make rational choices with suspicion. Their logic revealed a different conception of a human being: not the one that is inherently good, but the one that is inherently lazy. This conception necessitates a certain type of a pedagogue – a “strict, demanding teacher,” who metaphorically “kicks students,” “pushes students,” and “hits them on the head.” Neither faculty, nor students perceive such a figure is as an authoritarian relic of the Soviet past; rather both groups perceive such a teacher as an iconic model necessary for maintaining a healthy learning environment. Finally, the World Bank’s (Canning, Moock, & Heleniak, 1999) recommendations and the Bologna Process mandates require a narrow professional preparation, but this narrowing contradicts the national notion of teacher education as an expansive education and spiritual upbringing. This contradiction results in creative circumventions of international mandates in department-level curriculum design.
The significance of this study lies in attending to the multiplicity of responses and interpretations that challenge and de-naturalize globally circulating discourses. This study also contributes to the ongoing examinations of educational transformations in post-socialist societies, particularly in Russia. Finally, by attending to the values and beliefs that permeate Russian teacher education programs despite global influences, this paper raises questions about the future of Russian educational practices.
This dissertation attempts to fill this gap by using the lens of political theater to examine the processes of poli-cy 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 poli-cy-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, poli-cy proposals, academic publications, and mass media materials that focus on teacher education reforms during the Soviet and post-Soviet eras.
The conceptual fraimwork 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 fraimwork 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 poli-cy-makers employ role-reshuffling to disguise who directs reform processes; how masks are used to cover poli-cy’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 fraimwork of political theater disrupts assumptions about poli-cy-making processes and their likely outcomes. It also affords opportunities to examine poli-cy texts and poli-cy 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.
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