A deeper form of reflection: perezhivanie as a tool for teacher development

ABSTRACT

Crediting Vygotsky in introducing perezhivanie, I argue that perezhivanie acts analogously to reflection in problem solving and much beyond that and can be used as a developmental tool for teachers. Analyzing teacher’s perezhivanie, a mentor can better understand their practice. Teachers’ perezhivanie is a psychological reaction to a problematic situation in the classroom, comprising several stages from cognitive dissonance to meaning making, and performing a new activity to resolve the problem. My argument is based on a narrative study into 10 university language teachers’ experiences. Using the structural elements of the narrative, data from one participant were iteratively analyzed and presented in this article to discuss the teacher’s perezhivanie when she tried to solve emerging problems in the classroom. The analysis traces the relation of two immanent characteristics of perezhivanie, its process and content, to teachers’ agency. The article suggests how perezhivanie can be meaningfully incorporated into in-service mentoring programs.

KEYWORDS:

• In-service mentoring
• perezhivanie
• narrative analysis
• teacher development
• reflection

Students cheating as a trigger of teachers’ perezhivanie

‘Why did you [cheat]? For whom? For me? For you? For whom?’ [the participant appealing to her students after cheating was detected] They thought I’m so old that I cannot use the Internet. [the teacher to me] (Smirnova, 2019)

‘I’m sitting in my classroom, we’ve been planning for this formative Reading Test for weeks, and I’m relieved that it’s almost finished. Although I asked the student not to use their mobiles, suddenly I notice that some are cheating. What do I do now? Should I interrupt them in the middle of class? Should I pretend I don’t notice and ask the students after the test who cheated and who did not? What should I do?’ the teacher narrated.

This is an example of a teacher experiencing perezhivanie because she had envisioned getting fair results on her students’ reading skills performance but was unable to do so. During the test, she could not immediately change anything. Cognitive dissonance occurred due to the disparity between her plan and the reality what happened during the test. Her emerging Perezhivanie about fair grading led her to stop the test and appeal to the students’ agency, as expressed in the epigraph opening this article.

In recent years, the concept of perezhivanie has gained increasing interest in ELT (Feryok, 2020; Lantolf & Swain, 2019; Mahn, 2018). The rethinking and reshaping of language teacher education and development over the last two decades, from the cognitive learning theories of the positivistic paradigm to the sociocultural turn (Johnson, 2006), has led to a more context-sensitive approach to teacher learning and development, including mentoring (Wyatt & Dikilitaş, 2022), as its inevitable part (Malderez, 2024). For example, Barkhuizen’s volume (Barkhuizen, 2019) highlights a shift of focus from viewing teacher learning as an internal psychological process focused solely on subject expertise and teaching strategies. Instead, the authors in this volume emphasize teacher learning as a social activity situated within specific contexts. In this regard, perezhivanie, with its capacity to dialectically relate cognitive, emotional, and contextual factors (Lantolf & Swain, 2019), has emerged as a valuable unit of analysis in understanding teacher learning and development.

I use perezhivanie as a historically and culturally bound instant psychological response to a problematic situation, which often assists the teacher in resolving it (Smirnova, 2020). Problem solving is likely to occur in several stages, from cognitive dissonance to meaning making, resulting in restructuring of motives and the performance of a new activity. Perezhivanie dissipates after that. Perezhivanie, therefore, enables teachers to navigate those challenging situations and classroom dynamics of which they may not be fully aware, inhibiting reflective analysis.

This definition is largely born out of Vygotsky’s work on consciousness (Zavershneva & Van Der Veer, 2018, referring to Vygotsky, 1927). Specifically, Vygotsky highlights the dialectical unity of affect and intellect in perezhivanie, suggesting perezhivanie as a unit of analysis of consciousness (Выготский, 1984, in Russian). In contrast to the search for monism to overcome a dichotomy of individual and social, Vygotsky also suggests uniting these contradictory notions in perezhivanie dialectically (Vygotsky, 1994, p. 342). Perezhivanie is individual in the sense that it is my perezhivanie, but it is also bound up with situational features, as in ‘I have perezhivanie about something [contextual]’, which is associated with joint, group, or societal activity. Therefore, the individual and social are inseparable in perezhivanie, and their combination serves a particular stage in problem solving, from solving an external issue by external means to solving an internal issue by internal means (Выготский, 1931, pp. 376ff., in Russian). However, Vygotsky died before he could fully develop the notion, and had written mostly for a Russian audience, who use perezhivanie intuitively.

After Vygotsky, there were several attempts to interpret the polysemic concept from Russian. Following Vasilyuk (1991), perezhivanie is often translated as as ‘experiencing’ (Engeström & Sannino, 2010). Blunden (2016) suggests ‘lived experience’, admitting that perezhivanie cannot be translated as one word at all. It is also challenging to express how the notion can be identified (Feryok, 2019, p. 95), similar to ‘love’ or ‘happiness’. We use these words, but their epistemological understanding is problematic: can we explain them to someone who does not have them in their schema? It is also epistemological, in that perezhivanie is normally accessible in evocative accounts rather than as an ongoing experience. We tend to realize what our perezhivanie was only when it is over, and when we can reflect on it.

Although reflection is a good starting point for understanding perezhivanie, unlike the former, perezhivanie is an instant uncontrollable psychological response to a problematic situation, for example, when something in the lesson goes awry (Johnson & Golombek, 2016, p. 45), and becomes a problem for the teacher because there are no ready-made solutions. Traditionally, teacher education and development through meaning making and problem-solving have been approached via reflection and self-analysis (Mann, 2006; Tajeddin, 2022), for example, in action research (Burns et al., 2022; Cohen & Manion, 2018, p. 187; Farrell, 2022). Another example is Edge’s inquiry-based Cooperative Development (e.g. in Webb et al., 2022), based on Rogers’s (1961) idea of the non-judgmental discourse of ‘respect’, ‘empathy’ and ‘sincerity’. It aims at facilitating and raising teachers’ reflexive awareness (Edge, 2011) by using agreed and disciplined discourse moves in a conversation between a Speaker and an Understander.

There is increasing concern about the insufficient impact of mentoring programs on in-service teachers (Gordon & Brobeck, 2010; Hobson et al., 2009; Long et al., 2012; Maynard, 2010; Smith & Lewis, 2022). Although it is hard to underestimate the conventional methods of rational reflective practice (Farrell, 2018; Schön, 2016) in the program, cognition alone is insufficient for explaining such a complex process. Cognition primarily operates at the conscious level, while a significant portion of ‘thinking, knowing, representing knowledge, attending, processing information, reasoning, problem-solving and decision-making’ is driven by subconscious factors (Swain, 2013, p. 196), such as underlying motives and emotions.

Several authors, speaking about the functionality of emotions from the cultural historical paradigm, possibly imply perezhivanie without naming it so, though. For example, Ratner (2000, p. 6) calls emotions as thoughtful feelings, which are a part of thought. Holodynski (2013, p. 5), with reference to Leontiev (1978), relates emotions to ‘person’s actions and the activated motives’, and, speaking about their role in development, state that emotions serve to regulate actions and activity (Holodynski, 2013, p. 5 and p. 11). This correlates with my definition of perezhivanie above and elsewhere (Smirnova, 2021), where I show with the data how emotional and cognitive factors in perezhivanie raise teachers’ awareness about their aims of the lesson, and their teaching overall, and hence inform and shape their intentions to further actions.

In this article, I introduce the concept of perezhivanie, using Labov and Waletzky’s (1967) analytical framework, and, by utilizing the concepts of needs and motives, my own conceptual framework. I examine the experience of one Russian university teacher of English to answer the question: How can teacher educators or mentors understand a teacher’s practice by analyzing her perezhivanie? I show how perezhivanie allows access to many more contextual factors than those accessible by rational reflection, enabling teachers to become aware of them and resolve the major challenge. I do not distinguish different forms of perezhivanie, and its levels and polysemy here, because this holistic view affords insights into a more general picture for those researchers who are not familiar with the phenomenon (for a more detailed analysis of the levels and forms of perezhivanie see Smirnova, 2021, pp. 164–66).

The article provides a means to access the complex interplay of cognitive, emotional, and contextual factors that shape teachers’ experiences and decision-making processes. I discuss three features of perezhivanie revealed during the study: perezhivanie brings contextual features to the surface, prompts the narrative, and goes beyond reflection. Particularly drawing on parallels with reflection, I suggest using perezhivanie in teacher development – in collaborative mentoring and peer mentoring sessions.

Theorising teachers’ perezhivanie

To continue with the example above, having faced the cheating, the teacher reacted emotionally, because her mission as a teacher became questioned, and the underlying motive to assess the students fairly was not fulfilled, which triggered her perezhivanie. According to Activity Theory, emotions are seen as signals or reactions that emerge as individuals engage in activities to achieve or fulfil their motives (Leontiev, 1978, p. 120). Motives are the driving forces behind human actions, and represent the goals, intentions and needs that prompt individuals to engage in certain activities. With the motive to assess the students fairly, the teacher may experience satisfaction, or pride if their motive is realised.

Due to an obstacle that arose, the teacher’s motives become not fulfilled by a familiar teaching activity, and the teacher may become frustrated. Her perezhivanie emerges as a psychological response to the situation. The teacher’s frustration is likely to be an emotional factor of emerging perezhivanie and her meaning making how to resolve it form its cognitive factor, as in the situation above: ‘What do I do now? Should I interrupt them in the middle of class? Should I pretend I don’t notice and ask the students after the test who cheated and who did not? What should I do?’.

To resolve the challenging situation and reach the lesson aims, the teacher needs to restructure their motives and perform a new activity. Figure 1 reflects the integral role of motives and emotions in the process. Perezhivanie assists in giving meaning to a new and complex situation and encourages teacher’s focus on the problem. One of the major (and obvious) functions of emotions in teaching activity is to evaluate the situation, to find the necessary pedagogical solutions (Johnson & Worden, 2014). Emotions are dialectically united with cognition in perezhivanie (Vygotsky, 1994), and together grab teachers’ attention or focus, and do not allow the unfulfilled motive to disappear into the subconscious (Vygotsky, 1987).

Figure 1. The conceptual framework, where the presence of perezhivanie is marked in grey (adapted from Smirnova, 2020, p. 98).

The role of perezhivanie, therefore, is also to keep the teacher’s focus on it, evaluate the situation and help resolve it. Through the lens of Activity Theory (Давыдов, 2003; Рубинштейн, 2002, both in Russian), it means to restructure teacher’s motives, and Vygotsky calls it interiorisation, as a result of four stages of vraschivanie (Выготский, 1931, pp. 375, in Russian). This thinking is likely to be supported by mostly cognitive factors in perezhivanie, which accompany the resolution of the situation, from making sense of it to making decisions, to perform a new activity. Using the above example with the cheating, implies that the teacher might redesign the form of the assessment. She might try several options until finding the most successful one. By participating in such a qualitative reorganisation of practice, teachers reconstruct their knowledge and beliefs, and can grow because they become better placed to deal with similar issues or situations in the future.

Since teachers’ motives are different, their perezhivanie is also different, and the solutions can be different too. These differences are reflected in two immanent characteristics each perezhivanie has its process and its content, which Veresov (2017, p. 48) with reference to Varshava and Vygotsky (1931, p. 128) explains as ‘how I am experiencing something’ and ‘what I am experiencing’. The content of perezhivanie can always be understood from the context of the problematic situation as evidence why teacher’s motives are not realised, whereas emotions, or their absence, convey its process.

To reveal perezhivanie in the teachers’ stories, I used the Labov and Waletzky’s (1967) analytical framework, which is made up of the following elements: abstract, orientation, complications, resolution, evaluation, and coda, where orientation and complications often capture the content of perezhivanie. Table 1 summarises how these elements might map the process of teachers’ perezhivanie in the data (grey cells).

Table 1. The process of perezhivanie (in grey) within my and Labov and Waletsky’s (L&W) frameworks.

My framework	L&W	Function
Problematic classroom situation	Abstract	Introduction, e.g. in the form of a summary of the topic: what is this about?
No clear-cut solution	Orientation	When? Who? Where? What? i.e. information about the setting (e.g. people involved, time, place)
Emotional reaction	Complication	The problem occurred, Then what happened? What happened next?
Meaning making, getting insight	Evaluation	Reflection on how to overcome it. So what? What do the events mean to the narrator?
Restructuring motives	Result	What finally happened? How did it end?
New activity	Coda	There is no corresponding question, it is sometimes indicated by returning the perspective to the present

Therefore, epistemologically, the descriptions of the problematic situations and expressions of the participants’ emotional responses and meaning making towards new activity are coded as evidence of the participant’s perezhivanie, as shown in Figure 1 and Table 1.

Methodology

Narrative research, being meaningful, socially mediated, and emotion-capturing (Johnson & Golombek, 2002), is conducive to comprehend the depth of teachers’ experiences, and their perezhivanie. The chronological structure of narrative (Johnson & Golombek, 2002) facilitated the revelation of the dynamic nature of perezhivanie, showcasing how and why it emerges and dissipates.

The resulting coherent data enabled me to approach the data inductively. To put their messages across, the participants had to organise various accounts of practice ‘into temporally meaningful episodes’ (Polkinghorne, 1988, p. 1; see also Hollway & Jefferson, 2012). Their coherence enabled me to map into teachers’ perezhivanie, which comprises various factors impossible to predict in advance. If done deductively, with a restricted set of themes and categories, I would have run the risk obtaining an impoverished picture of their perezhivanie.

Participants and ethical considerations

The data utilized here is part of a broader dataset and sourced from a four-year research project conducted at the National University of Science and Technology (MISIS) and the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE), which are two leading Russian universities in their technological enhancement. Full details of the research project have been described elsewhere (Smirnova, 2021).

The initial sample consisted of 10 language teachers. A small sample was chosen because of the expected time-consuming verbatim data transcription and analysis of narrative data (Goodson & Sikes, 2001, p. 22; Wells, 2011, p. 20). The participants were selected based on the regular teaching with technology, and of five or more years of ELT experience overall. The latter was crucial in terms of capturing the essence of perezhivanie, because according to Vygotsky (1994), perezhivanie is different at different stages of individual development. This criterion enabled me to identify ‘information-rich cases’ (Patton, 2023), that is, individuals who possessed relevant characteristics and depth of knowledge that could substantially contribute to addressing my research question. Experienced teachers were more likely to exhibit perezhivanie triggered by the deeper purposes and approaches of their teaching practices, such as questioning ‘Why do I teach what I teach?’ and ‘Why do I teach the way I do?’ (Freeman, 1982⁠, p. 27) rather than solely focusing on the content of teaching itself.

The study presented both potential strengths and challenges in terms of the ethical sensitivity. The teachers were informed ahead of time to mitigate any expectations of structured questioning, and they could decide the topics they wished to discuss, which promoted autonomy and allowed teachers control over the narrative flow. It was also mentioned that emotional responses are inherent to narrative methodology (Johnson & Golombek, 2002), because the teachers discussed sensitive topics. To minimize potential related ethical issues (Zeni, 2001), I provided participants with agency over their contributions. Then, the written informed consent signed prior to participating in the interviews, outlined the purpose of the study, procedures, potential risks and benefits, privacy protections, data use, and the participant’s right to withdraw at any time. I also followed up after interviews to check on participants’ well-being and allowed them to provide any additional thoughts, which they often did.

Conducting interviews in Russian, despite participants being English teachers, aimed to alleviate language-related anxieties. Additionally, Russian discourse tends to be highly emotionally charged, and the language has an abundance of linguistic tools for conveying subtle shades of emotional meaning (Wierzbicka, 2009). Both factors created space for the problematic situations to emerge and be verbalized, which is crucial to reveal perezhivanie. I got plenty of perezhivanie in the data, and this was telling by itself in terms of the ubiquitous nature of the phenomenon.

Given the key role of interpretation in narrative analysis, and the difficulties for a Western audience to understand the phenomenon of perezhivanie, several steps were taken to establish credibility of findings. First, the participants were invited to review their interview transcripts and provide clarification or feedback. Second, when presenting the data, I tried to be as transparent and reflexive as possible in how my own existing insider knowledge affected the research, and how the research affected my newly obtained research knowledge. Although I take perezhivanie for given and recognize it in the data as a phenomenon, I did not ask the participants any leading questions about it, but instead simply offered a space for their stories, and then stepped back.

Data collection

I interviewed the teacher twice, face-to-face in her classroom. In the first interview the participant was prompted with the question ‘How did you come to be such a [technologically advanced] teacher that you think you are now?’ (Smirnova, 2021, p. 123). I made effort to guide discussions toward a narrative account, prioritizing storytelling over technical details of technology usage. Amid their narrative flow, low researcher mediation was used: back channelling, nodding, helping shape a narrative with oohs and ahs, and asking the storyteller ‘What happened next?’ At the second meeting interactional narratives were used (Ochs & Capps, 1996), which contained the negotiation of meanings of perezhivanie and its role in teaching.

Data analysis

The interviews were transcribed verbatim, uploaded into NVivo, and then analyzed in two stages, first, using holistic content analysis (Lieblich et al., 1998) to create proto codes by listening, and second, by inductive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006, p. 83) to create codes and capture challenges teachers faced when integrating technology.

Using the Labov and Waletzky’s (1967) analytical framework, I could capture the content of perezhivanie by thematic analysis of the challenges the teacher faced. ORIENTATION mapped out the contextual features (e.g. the name of the course, students’ profile, group dynamics, time of the term, technology used), and situated the teacher’s story within specific temporal and spatial contexts. COMPLICATION referred to the issue confronted by the teacher. By relating this issue to the ORIENTATION, I could speculate on the reasons behind the problem by linking them to the teacher’s beliefs, mission, and unrealised motives. EVALUATION captured participants’ emotional and cognitive reflections on the situation, and sometimes dispersed throughout the narrative. RESULT referred to a restructuring activity, wherein teachers, through their meaning-making processes, redesigned the lesson. Their new actions often led to positive changes, and subsequently, their perezhivanie usually dissipated upon resolving the issue.

Findings

Eva (pseudonym) was selected for this paper because she openly discussed her perezhivanie, requiring no interpretation. I briefly introduce the teacher, her context, and illustrate how analysing her perezhivanie aids understanding her practice.

Eva has taught for 27 years, spending 22 of those years at HSE University teaching Legal English. She emphasized this area requires a focus on legal vocabulary, but there is a lack of specific legal vocabulary practice in the ‘English for Lawyers’ course book they use. Eva employs Quizlet (https://quizlet.com) to provide her students with more extensive vocabulary practice. Below I present Eva’s perezhivanie, and mark different elements of Eva’s narratives according to Labov and Waletzky’s (1967) analytical framework, introduced above, using Cortazzi’s (1991) suggestion for the abbreviation: A=Abstract, O = Orientation, C = Complication, R = Result, E = Evaluation, Coda = Coda.

Perezhivanie about the quality of learning

Eva’s Perezhivanie about the quality of learning is associated with her teaching of Legal English: ‘We graduate [international] lawyers, who do not speak English’. She strongly believes international lawyers cannot succeed professionally without public speaking skills in English. She worries her students avoid speaking activities:

We have 4th year students, who cannot do a presentation in English, or cannot remember the text. Or, for example they say ‘I’m afraid of any public speaking’. I tell them ‘guys, you’re lawyers. It’s a rare thing that you’ll deal with paper only, you’ll need to negotiate things in English anyway’.

Using Labov and Waletzky’s (1967) framework, Eva’s perezhivanie can be outlined as follows:

O: We have 4th year students,

C: who cannot do a presentation in English, or cannot remember the text. Or, for example they say ‘I’m afraid of any public speaking.’

R: I tell them ‘guys, you’re lawyers.

E: It’s a rare thing that you’ll deal with paper only,

Coda: you’ll need to negotiate things anyway’.

Eva’s Perezhivanie about the quality of learning stemmed from various reasons, including instances of student dishonesty. For example, a student of her Legal English course submitted an assignment entitled ‘Literature review on crime research’, described as professionally written – but analyzing works of fiction like Dostoevsky’s ‘Crime and Punishment’. The supposedly paid writer took ‘literature’ literally, but the student did not read their purchased paper before submission, to Eva’s amazement.

Another reason is the target language. Eva believes reluctance to speak comes from insufficient mastery of Legal English terminology, but her C1 (Common European Framework of Reference) level students often opt for General English, in Eva’s words:

It is a huge challenge to learn that particular ESP vocabulary. When I start I show them in columns: this is Informal, this is Academic, this is Legal, this is General. Every time I ask them to paraphrase [according to register], to use at least what we’ve already chosen. It does not help [the students say]: ‘but I’ve managed to say it and they have understood, if the translation is the same’. I tell them ‘the same but not the same’, it is nonsense from a [professional] legal English perspective. Lawyers don’t say it like that. Apart from teaching from [an ESP] book I read a lot, read in English, in Russian to be able to explain ‘Cost and Expenses’, they cannot be explained in plain terms, they need [Legal English jargon]

Using Labov and Waletzky’s (1967) framework, I analyze this very emotional talk as the following:

C: It is a huge challenge to learn that particular ESP vocabulary.

O: When I start, I show them in columns: this is Informal, this is Academic, this is Legal, this is General. Every time I ask them to paraphrase [according to register], to use at least what we’ve already chosen.

C: It does not help [the students say]: ‘but I’ve managed to say it and they have understood, if the translation is the same’.

E: I tell them ‘The same but not the same’,

R: it is nonsense from a [professional] legal English perspective. Lawyers don’t say it like that.

Coda:Apart from teaching from [an ESP] book I read a lot, read in English, in Russian to be able to explain ‘Cost and Expenses’, they cannot be explained in plain terms, they need [Legal English jargon].

To improve speaking, Eva initially attempted a presentation assignment requiring use of specific legal terms. However, the students tended to memorize their presentations, unable to respond to any questions afterward: ‘[After the presentation, by attempting to answer the questions on it], they became different people, and could not say a word’. This failure prompted Eva to explore more effective solutions as her Perezhivanie about the quality of learning was still on. One such solution involved a series of classroom vocabulary practice activities using Quizlet.

However, the unexpectedly slow Internet ruined her lesson plan. Eva considered offloading Quizlet tasks as homework for asynchronous homework but could not confirm student completion. Consequently, Eva revised her approach by having each student create a short Quizlet task on Legal English vocabulary and share the link with her. As a result, they got a set of students’ tasks, which they peer reviewed next lesson. Students enjoyed seeing their work displayed – and got the practice Eva wanted and this perezhivanie was over in this instance.

Overcoming this perezhivanie gave Eva insight: delegating agency might work well with her students, and it reduces cheating. This success might become a developmental milestone for Eva from Vygotsky’s dialectical methodology perspective, enhancing her understanding and enabling her to apply the insight to other activities.

Conclusion

The article discusses the concept of ‘perezhivanie’ introduced by Vygotsky and its potential application for teacher development. Using Labov and Waletsky’s story elements, I illustrated how perezhivanie can be recognized in data by focusing on its process and content, and formulated it as ‘perezhivanie about something’. This something encapsulates the nuances of teachers’ contextual circumstances, and teachers’ motives and needs (Smirnova, 2023), which a mentor, for example, can address to assist the mentee in problem solving.

If a mentor recognizes Eva’s Perezhivanie about the quality of learning, they could emphasize better learning outcomes, which new learning spaces could stimulate. By using appropriate responsive mediation (Johnson & Golombek, 2016) to foster Eva’s designing skills, they offer supportive, practical problem-solving to take immediate practical steps. This collaborative partnership in learning can become transformative (Meyer & Land, 2005) for Eva, because by grappling with this problematic situation, Eva gains valuable insights and builds a more robust repertoire of strategies. The experience of resolving the issue equips her to navigate and better respond to analogous challenges she may encounter in the future.

Boud and Walker (2013) argued that facilitating personal change is difficult even for the motivated. Achieving this goal requires accepting a teacher as a whole-person-who-teaches, and discussing teacher’s perezhivanie meets this requirement. Using graded responsive mediation (Yoon & Kim, 2019, p. 92), a mentor could design its ‘implicit’ part around teacher’s perezhivanie, and then move collaboratively to a more explicit part – to find an emerging growth point (McNeill & Duncan, 2000), provide necessary emotional support (Malderez, 2024), and work out possible solutions for the problematic situation. To sum, this co-construction might first, grant the mentor access to teacher’s inner worlds, and then the mentor could scaffold the teacher’s ability to navigate situations and resolve triggering problems.

The participants readily discussed perezhivanie without direct questioning – it permeated and likely prompted their narratives, creating a narrative impetus or ‘narrative necessity’ in Bruner’s terms (Bruner, 1991, p. 9). Perezhivanie, perhaps, helped them voice meaningful ideas, and gain new meanings and insights into their practice. A likely reason why they had chosen that particular classroom situations to share with me, was that they were still trying to understand something in these situations for themselves. Our dialogue often continued post-story, suggesting perezhivanie seeking resolution of the unresolved issue.

Taking advantage of this research outcome, I suggest using perezhivanie in another partnerships in learning, which has a non-hierarchical and sometimes informal structure – peer mentoring or peer tutoring (Bunting & Williams, 2017; Lapeña‐Pérez et al., 2011). This strategy may help teachers give more meaning to their experiences, when they openly discuss their perezhivanie related to designing lesson plans, managing classes, handling curriculum constraints, or challenges they face with all of this. The discussions might supply nuanced insight into the teachers’ contextual circumstances, as they explore different interpretations of their experiences, and gain new perspectives.

To conclude, I distinguished between perezhivanie and reflection. While reflective practice can be emotional, it is consciously driven. Perezhivanie draws on subconscious needs, motives, and beliefs – dimensions not fully accessible through reflection. This limited access might hinder teachers from making full sense of an issue, therefore from fully resolving an incident. Whereas perezhivanie bridges conscious and unconscious (Smirnova, 2021, p. 183), enabling access to the memory beyond reflection’s reach. Although this analytical depth surpasses reflection, perezhivanie could spur what is commonly referred to as ‘reflection-on-action’ and build reflective capacity.

Consent statement

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Ethics approval statement

The study was approved by the Environment, Education and Development School Panel PGR Ethics Committee, University of Manchester, UK. Ref: 2016–0229–380

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.