Teacher Education Reform As Political Theater by Elena Aydarova;

Author:Elena Aydarova;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2019-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

Figure 8. Portrait of a graduate (Federal Standards for General Education 2012, 3–4).

Apart from qualities that emerged in response to national struggles, there were also those that represented global flows of educational transformations. Items 3, 5, 6, 9, and 11 echoed qualities and traits that can now be found in standards documents of nations across the globe: cooperation, creativity, and critical thinking became the buzzwords associated with twenty-first-century competencies. Those were believed to be necessary for the creation of a knowledge economy and for securing a nation’s competitiveness. In a way, the standards set the agenda for creating universal neoliberal subjects—subjects whose qualities made them indistinguishable from subjects in China, India, or the United States because similar qualities were promoted as targets for educational systems around the world.

Russia’s attempts throughout the Soviet era to create a distinct subject—different from those produced by capitalist educational systems—became erased with the push for universal “soft skills” allegedly necessary for the participation in the global economy. This erasure demonstrated most clearly the change in the purposes of schooling. For decades before this, standards documents, along with textbooks in pedagogy or curriculum guides, included the statement “A graduate should know the scientific, literary, and artistic accomplishments of humanity and his/her society.” This phrase harkens back to the Soviet conception of encyclopedic knowledge that schools should transmit to students. In their evaluations of the Russian system, international organization reports described this conception as a deficiency (Canning et al. 2004; OECD 1998). In the new standards, this aspect was missing. Instead, “an appreciation for science, education, labor, and art” appeared. No longer responsible for knowledge transmission, schools had to facilitate students’ “personal development,” the parameters of which were predetermined as a set of qualities necessary to live in “the modern world.” Those qualities set the parameters for specific “behavior archetypes,” foreclosing possibilities of open-ended human becoming.

Discussions of the new standards caused an uproar in society. Their introduction did not create the change desired by policymakers. Teachers and schools put on a performance of having complied with the new standards without really changing much in their daily teaching (Aydarova “Fiction-Making”). Thus, a new slogan emerged—that a new school needed a new teacher.

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