I am an Assistant Professor of Comparative and International Education. My research interests lie at the intersections of educational policy, 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.
Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education
Background: In recent years, intermediary organizations have increasingly influenced educational ... more Background: In recent years, intermediary organizations have increasingly influenced educational policy. Among other proposals, they have promoted teacher education redesign based on technocratic values and stringent accountability measures. In response to these policy changes and the intensifying crisis in the teaching profession, teacher educators have been called to engage in policy debates. Yet, to date, few studies have explored how teacher educators participate in policy advocacy. Purpose/Research Question: The purpose of this study is to examine variations in teacher educators’ efforts to influence policymaking decisions. Using the conceptual framework of policy advocacy, the study addresses the following research question: How do teacher educators engage in policy advocacy? Research Design: The study utilizes multiple case study methodology and incorporates four cases. Through a qualitative analysis of interviews, policy artifacts, policy documents, and videos of official po...
Warren and Venzant Chambers (2020) raised an important concern about the marginalization and elim... more Warren and Venzant Chambers (2020) raised an important concern about the marginalization and elimination of social foundations of education in educator preparation. Yet, their focus on “an essential tripartite coalition of disciplinary perspectives” encapsulated in sociology, history, and philosophy runs counter the interdisciplinary nature of social foundations.
Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning, and Equity (SCALE) provided a commentary on the manuscr... more Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning, and Equity (SCALE) provided a commentary on the manuscripts in the first part of this special issue, which highlighted the benefits of edTPA and the necessity for such assessment programs to improve teacher education and strengthen teaching practices. In turn, the authors responded to the SCALE commentary. The authors’ responses raise concerns about equity, fairness, and unintended consequences of teacher performance assessments. These responses highlight the need for continued dialogue on ways to improve teacher education and strengthen the teaching profession.
ABSTRACT Scholars have long urged teacher educators to engage in policy advocacy and to respond t... more ABSTRACT Scholars have long urged teacher educators to engage in policy advocacy and to respond to mounting attacks on the teacher education field. Prior research has shown that teacher educators feel largely unprepared to participate in policy debates. This observation raises the question of how those who do engage in advocacy learn to navigate the contested terrain of teacher education policy. Drawing on a multiple case study research project, we argue that learning policy advocacy is a prolonged process, during which participants acquire the language used by policymakers and learn the procedures utilized by policymaking communities. This learning entails peripheral participation in policy processes, modeling, and mentoring. Our study sheds light on the importance of professional networks and relationships as support systems to expand teacher educators’ ability to participate in policy advocacy and reclaim their professional voice in policy debates.
In the last twenty years, many countries around the world embarked on reforming teacher education... more 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.
Critical policy analysis examining how powerful actors use educational policies to reproduce uneq... more Critical policy analysis examining how powerful actors use educational policies to reproduce unequal social structures presents many challenges. These challenges are amplified by the politics of spectacle, where duplicity comes to dominate how educational policies are conceptualized, presented to the public, and subsequently enacted. The pursuit of truth in policy proposals or reform designs often entails navigating contentious spaces of fiction-making, fakery, and duplicitous performances, sometimes involving researchers themselves. Drawing on Bakhtin’s writing on jokers’ pursuit of truth, I revisit the tensions I encountered in my ethnographic fieldwork in the Russian Federation to reimagine the possibilities of navigating research with the powerful. This paper offers a methodological provocation to rethink ethical imperatives and poses new questions for reimaging the problematics of critical policy analysis focused on equity and justice in the post-truth era.
Childhood and Schooling in (Post)Socialist Societies, 2017
Official politics in children’s lives during socialism took various forms, ranging from school cu... more Official politics in children’s lives during socialism took various forms, ranging from school curriculum, youth organizations, and celebrations in everyday life. Drawing on current scholarship about children’s politics and our collective biography research, we explore the everydays of childhood—from mundane to ideological—to make visible the multiple ways in which our political agency emerged in particular spaces and times. Our memory stories are about hair bows as part of school uniform and the multiple roles they played in our being and becoming schoolgirls and political subjects. The emphasis is on how wearing (or not) a hair bow helped us work with/in or against the norms, as well as feeling the pain and desire to be or act otherwise.
ABSTRACT International organisations facilitated the spread of competency-based reforms around th... more ABSTRACT International organisations facilitated the spread of competency-based 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 competency-based 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.
Most research on global transformations in education has focused on the actions of political and ... more Most research on global transformations in education has focused on the actions of political and economic elites. As a result, attempts to contest and subvert globally circulated policies at subnational levels have received less attention. To address this gap, this study focuses on discursive contestations around educational reforms in the United Arab Emirates. Drawing on the theoretical framework of decoloniality (Mignolo, 2011), I explore how Western interventions into educational policies are justified by dominant discourses and challenged by their opponents through public media in the United Arab Emirates. Even though alternative discourses provide constructions of education useful for charting the trajectories of pluriversal futures, the struggle between different voices resolves in favor of global “best” practices. This happens not because they are more rational or universal, but because the voices of dissent are disconnected and fragmented. The significance of this paper lies...
Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education
Background: In recent years, intermediary organizations have increasingly influenced educational ... more Background: In recent years, intermediary organizations have increasingly influenced educational policy. Among other proposals, they have promoted teacher education redesign based on technocratic values and stringent accountability measures. In response to these policy changes and the intensifying crisis in the teaching profession, teacher educators have been called to engage in policy debates. Yet, to date, few studies have explored how teacher educators participate in policy advocacy. Purpose/Research Question: The purpose of this study is to examine variations in teacher educators’ efforts to influence policymaking decisions. Using the conceptual framework of policy advocacy, the study addresses the following research question: How do teacher educators engage in policy advocacy? Research Design: The study utilizes multiple case study methodology and incorporates four cases. Through a qualitative analysis of interviews, policy artifacts, policy documents, and videos of official po...
Warren and Venzant Chambers (2020) raised an important concern about the marginalization and elim... more Warren and Venzant Chambers (2020) raised an important concern about the marginalization and elimination of social foundations of education in educator preparation. Yet, their focus on “an essential tripartite coalition of disciplinary perspectives” encapsulated in sociology, history, and philosophy runs counter the interdisciplinary nature of social foundations.
Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning, and Equity (SCALE) provided a commentary on the manuscr... more Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning, and Equity (SCALE) provided a commentary on the manuscripts in the first part of this special issue, which highlighted the benefits of edTPA and the necessity for such assessment programs to improve teacher education and strengthen teaching practices. In turn, the authors responded to the SCALE commentary. The authors’ responses raise concerns about equity, fairness, and unintended consequences of teacher performance assessments. These responses highlight the need for continued dialogue on ways to improve teacher education and strengthen the teaching profession.
ABSTRACT Scholars have long urged teacher educators to engage in policy advocacy and to respond t... more ABSTRACT Scholars have long urged teacher educators to engage in policy advocacy and to respond to mounting attacks on the teacher education field. Prior research has shown that teacher educators feel largely unprepared to participate in policy debates. This observation raises the question of how those who do engage in advocacy learn to navigate the contested terrain of teacher education policy. Drawing on a multiple case study research project, we argue that learning policy advocacy is a prolonged process, during which participants acquire the language used by policymakers and learn the procedures utilized by policymaking communities. This learning entails peripheral participation in policy processes, modeling, and mentoring. Our study sheds light on the importance of professional networks and relationships as support systems to expand teacher educators’ ability to participate in policy advocacy and reclaim their professional voice in policy debates.
In the last twenty years, many countries around the world embarked on reforming teacher education... more 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.
Critical policy analysis examining how powerful actors use educational policies to reproduce uneq... more Critical policy analysis examining how powerful actors use educational policies to reproduce unequal social structures presents many challenges. These challenges are amplified by the politics of spectacle, where duplicity comes to dominate how educational policies are conceptualized, presented to the public, and subsequently enacted. The pursuit of truth in policy proposals or reform designs often entails navigating contentious spaces of fiction-making, fakery, and duplicitous performances, sometimes involving researchers themselves. Drawing on Bakhtin’s writing on jokers’ pursuit of truth, I revisit the tensions I encountered in my ethnographic fieldwork in the Russian Federation to reimagine the possibilities of navigating research with the powerful. This paper offers a methodological provocation to rethink ethical imperatives and poses new questions for reimaging the problematics of critical policy analysis focused on equity and justice in the post-truth era.
Childhood and Schooling in (Post)Socialist Societies, 2017
Official politics in children’s lives during socialism took various forms, ranging from school cu... more Official politics in children’s lives during socialism took various forms, ranging from school curriculum, youth organizations, and celebrations in everyday life. Drawing on current scholarship about children’s politics and our collective biography research, we explore the everydays of childhood—from mundane to ideological—to make visible the multiple ways in which our political agency emerged in particular spaces and times. Our memory stories are about hair bows as part of school uniform and the multiple roles they played in our being and becoming schoolgirls and political subjects. The emphasis is on how wearing (or not) a hair bow helped us work with/in or against the norms, as well as feeling the pain and desire to be or act otherwise.
ABSTRACT International organisations facilitated the spread of competency-based reforms around th... more ABSTRACT International organisations facilitated the spread of competency-based 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 competency-based 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.
Most research on global transformations in education has focused on the actions of political and ... more Most research on global transformations in education has focused on the actions of political and economic elites. As a result, attempts to contest and subvert globally circulated policies at subnational levels have received less attention. To address this gap, this study focuses on discursive contestations around educational reforms in the United Arab Emirates. Drawing on the theoretical framework of decoloniality (Mignolo, 2011), I explore how Western interventions into educational policies are justified by dominant discourses and challenged by their opponents through public media in the United Arab Emirates. Even though alternative discourses provide constructions of education useful for charting the trajectories of pluriversal futures, the struggle between different voices resolves in favor of global “best” practices. This happens not because they are more rational or universal, but because the voices of dissent are disconnected and fragmented. The significance of this paper lies...
In the last ten years, Russian policy-makers undertook several attempts to reform teacher educati... more In the last ten years, Russian policy-makers undertook several attempts to reform teacher education, with the last attempt focusing on eliminating “reform imitation.” In this multi-sited ethnography of two Russian teacher education institutions, I show that their daily functioning can be best described as fiction-making. Administrators, faculty, and students perceive their daily practices as a formality, a fiction, a lie, or a farce. A comparison of policy-makers’ discourses and practices on the ground reveals a paradox: while reforms are intended to eliminate “reform imitation” and fiction-making, the very act of a reform and the ideology of consumerism it promotes make fiction-making an ever more attractive coping mechanism for dealing with the constantly shifting terrains of Russian education.
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 frameworks for educational research – a Marxist legacy where a researcher is meant to solve social problems – also seek to convince national policy-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 the current historic moment of increased global interconnectedness, English language classroom... more In the current historic moment of increased global interconnectedness, English language classrooms have become battle grounds of competing ideologies and orientations. In this ethnographic study of two foreign language teacher education programs in the Russian Federation I examine how language ideologies inherited from the socialist past are enacted, contested, and coopted by students brought up in the capitalist present. I analyze how the aesthetic pursuit of linguistic perfection is used to preserve an established hierarchy of academic relations in teacher education programs, all the while desires for a “beautiful life” common among both faculty and students engender pragmatic orientations that reflect English language commodification trends prevalent in the Russian society. The competing demands of aesthetic orientations and pragmatic desires undermine each other and foster tensions and contradictions among participants. The struggles observed in the foreign language education programs reflect the challenges of laying capitalist ideologies over socialist commitments both in educational settings and in post-socialist societies at large.
Even though Bakhtin’s theory has had a profound impact on scholarship in different disciplines, i... more Even though Bakhtin’s theory has had a profound impact on scholarship in different disciplines, it has often suffered from fragmentation of his ideas and from insufficient attention paid to a cross-sectional reading of his work. In this paper, I will present a synthesized theoretical framework of becoming based on Bakhtin’s (1981, 1984a, 1984b, 1986) constructs of historical, ideological, social, and cultural becoming as those are reflected in the Russian language editions of Bakhtin’s work (Bakhtin, 2003). According to Bakhtin, becoming is the process of emergence and development that does not follow a linear progression and does not have a predetermined destination. Its distinguishing features comprise “polyphony, dialogue, [and] unfinalizability” (Bakhtin, 1984a, p. 285). Bakhtin (1981, 1984b) conceptualized individuals and social groups as active agents undergoing transformations as they struggle with alien discourses and transforming the reality around them through creative play, commonly referred to as carnival (Bakhtin, 1984b). Dialogue plays a central role in revealing the distinctions in worldviews, socio-ideological orientations, and power differentials (Bakhtin, 1981). Several aspects of becoming are central for understanding social processes and changes. First, individual, social, and cultural becoming proceeds through a dialogue with the Other (Bakhtin, 1984a, p. 287). On a national scale, social and cultural transformations proceed through a contact with external Others (Bakhtin, 1981) facilitated through the spread of cultural globalization and neoliberal ideology. Second, language serves as the ideological medium in which individuals struggle with various discourses and appropriate some while resisting others (Bakhtin, 1981). In this struggle, the power hierarchies and the imposition of authoritative discourses bear significant consequences for individual and social becoming (Bakhtin, 1981). Third, historical memory as well as the co-existence of the vestiges of the past and the future (or multitemporality) shape human activities in the present and affect the trajectories of becoming (Bakhtin, 1986). Tracing the movement through time/space scales of Self or the Other affords an understanding of transformational identities of emergent human beings (Bakhtin, 1981). Finally, Bakhtin’s theory of becoming attends to the collective nature of social struggles that seek to subvert oppressive authoritarian structures through humor, parody, and other forms of carnival (Bakhtin, 1984b). Focus on bodies and corporeal engagement in resistance, subversion, and transformation is an important element of becoming that emerges from Rabelais and His World (Bakhtin, 1984). A composite rather than a fragmented construct of becoming presents a great potential for examining individual, social, and cultural transformations. Its application to the analysis of the global spread of neoliberal ideology can reveal the areas of struggle, contestation, and appropriation.
Russian participation in the Bologna Process and other educational reforms has unleashed a host o... more Russian participation in the Bologna Process and other educational reforms has unleashed a host of conflicts and contradictions. Overt changes in degree structure and credit hour allocations are accompanied by subtler transformations: changing conceptions of valid knowledge, different expectations of student-teacher relationships, and a new paradigm of professional preparation (Aydarova, 2014). These changes represent global trends in reforming education and are brought by twenty years of international organizations’ involvement in Russian policy-making. Under constant reform is the sphere of teacher education – an institution responsible for both transmitting cultural values and creating cultural change (Lynch & Plunkett, 1973). Transnational processes affecting teacher education are based on the assumption of universality of values packaged in the reforms. My ethnographic work at two teacher education institutions in different Russian locations challenges assumptions of universality and presents an analysis of how participants promote local logic as an antidote to the new paradigm introduced by international actors and processes. Akin to many Russian public speakers and activities, my study participants underscore the difference in traditional values that becomes more visible through a contact with global blueprints in order to challenge the imposition of global designs. The goals of my paper are three-fold: to examine the lived experiences and meaning-making processes of those affected by the Bologna Process and educational globalization; to document the dialogue between the global forces of modernization and local forces of conservatism, which my participants call “kvass patriotism” – after a traditional Russian drink called “kvass;” as well as to problematize and de-naturalize the “common-sense” of global discourses (Gounko & Smale, 2007) by examining the counter-arguments they evoke in local spaces.
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.
In the last twenty years, many countries around the world embarked on reforming teacher education... more 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.
Introduction to the special issue in European Education
Free download here: http://www.tandfonli... more Introduction to the special issue in European Education
Official politics in children’s lives during socialism took various forms, ranging from school cu... more Official politics in children’s lives during socialism took various forms, ranging from school curriculum, youth organizations, and celebrations in everyday life. Drawing on current scholarship about children’s politics and our collective biography research, we explore the everydays of childhood—from mundane to ideological—to make visible the multiple ways in which our political agency emerged in particular spaces and times. Our memory stories are about hair bows as part of school uniform and the multiple roles they played in our being and becoming schoolgirls and political subjects. The emphasis is on how wearing (or not) a hair bow helped us work with/in or against the norms, as well as feeling the pain and desire to be or act otherwise.
Around the world, countries undertake teacher education reforms in response to international norm... more Around the world, countries undertake teacher education reforms in response to international norms and assessments. Russia has been no exception. Elena Aydarova develops a unique theatrical framework to tell the story of a small group of reformers who enacted a major reform to modernize teacher education in Russia. Based on scripts circulated in global policy networks and ideologies of national development, this reform was implemented despite great opposition—but how? Drawing on extensive ethnographic material, Aydarova teases out the contradictions in this process. Teacher Education Reform as Political Theater reveals how the official story of improving education obscured dramatic and, ultimately, socially conservative changes in the purposes of schooling, the nature and perception of teachers’ work, and the design of teacher education. Despite the official rhetoric, Aydarova argues, modernization reforms such as we see in the Russian context normalize social inequality and put educational systems at the service of global corporations. As similar dramas unfold around the world, this book considers how members of scholarly communities and the broader public can respond to reformers’ stories of crises and urgent calls for reform on other national stages.
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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 frameworks for educational research – a Marxist legacy where a researcher is meant to solve social problems – also seek to convince national policy-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 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.
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