Global Discourses and Local Responses: A Dialogic Perspective on Educational Reforms in the Russian Federation

Abstract

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.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This work was carried out with the help of College of Education 2011 Summer Research Development Fellowship and College of Education 2012 Summer Research Fellowship from Michigan State University. I would like to thank Peter Youngs and Lynn Paine for their support in carrying out this project as well as Jeremy Rappleye and Bevin Roue for helpful feedback on the earlier drafts of this paper. I am also deeply grateful to Iveta Silova for her tireless care in the editing stages and to the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on this manuscript.

Notes

¹All names used in this paper are pseudonyms to protect participants’ anonymity.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Olena Aydarova

Olena Aydarova is a postdoctoral scholar at Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, Arizona State University. Her research focuses on global flows of educational policies, teacher education reforms, internationalization of education, as well as foreign language teacher preparation. She has taught in Ukraine, China, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States.