Pedagogies of Culture

Schooling and Identity in Post-Soviet Tatarstan, Russia

Dilyara Suleymanova

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030272449
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030272456
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice
• Index: Social Sciences

Through an ethnographic study of schooling in the Republic of Tatarstan, this book explores how competing notions of nationhood and belonging are constructed, articulated and negotiated within educational spaces. Amidst major political and ideological moves toward centralization in Russia under the Putin presidency, this small provincial town in Tatarstan provides a unique case of local attempts to promote and preserve minority languages and cultures through education and schooling. Ultimately, the study reveals that while schooling can be an effective instrument of the state to transform individuals as well as society as a whole, school also encompasses various spaces where the agency of local actors unfolds and official messages are contested. Looking at what happens inside schools and beyond—in classrooms, hallways and playgrounds to private households or local Islamic schools—Dilyara Suleymanova here offers a detailed ethnographic account of the way centrally devised educationalpolicies are being received, negotiated and contested on the ground.

© The Author(s) 2020

D. SuleymanovaPedagogies of CultureAnthropological Studies of Educationhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27245-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Education and the Politics of Belonging in Russia

Dilyara Suleymanova¹

(1)

University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

Dilyara Suleymanova

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Public education is implicated in a variety of issues of both individual concern and societal relevance. As an institution that is central to the reproduction of social inequalities and intrinsic to economic strategies and social advancement, it is key to many global developmental projects and is pivotal for upholding ideological systems and bureaucratic regimes. This book sets out to explore education as an institution that seeks to form, transform and reproduce the sense of identification and belonging among children and youth, thus envisioning to shape political attitudes and cultural attachments within society. It tells the story of the efforts of cultural activists and educators to preserve and reproduce minority culture, language and identity in the context of the state-led centralization and homogenization. This book engages with the following questions: How do children and youth acquire ideas about identity and belonging through education? In what ways are educational policies and discourses being (re-)produced, negotiated and contested, by politicians and teachers, parents and students?

As an anthropologist who cares about “large issues in small places” (Eriksen, 2001), I will take up and discuss these questions throughout the book by examining educational practices in a provincial town in the Republic of Tatarstan, an autonomous region within Russia. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Tatarstan have pursued the project of political and economic sovereignty and advocated for the wider federalization of Russia, challenging the unitary vision of Russia’s political development and national identity (Graney, 2009). While pursuing an agenda of Tatar ethno-national revival, Tatarstan simultaneously devised a project of regional nation-building in order to strengthen the population’s identification with the republic. Education is a particularly significant site for exploring the tensions between these various nation-building projects.

Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, this book reveals the complexities and contradictions of educational practice as a tool of identity construction. Looking at what happens inside schools—in the classrooms, hallways and playgrounds, but also around them—this book offers a detailed ethnographic account of the way in which centrally devised educational policies are being received, negotiated and contested on the ground.

Public education in post-socialist Russia has been a site of competing projects of nationhood and belonging, with various actors advancing their claims over the educational content to be transmitted in schools. With the demise of the Soviet regime, education has been released from tight ideological and bureaucratic control and opened up to new ideas and visions of political and national development. Regional governments, ethno-national movements, religious institutions and other public actors have received access to schools seeking to expose children to various ideologies and certain kinds of knowledge.

Simultaneously, in various regions of Russia, education became implicated in linguistic and cultural revitalization efforts (Chevalier, 2013, 2017; Suleymanova, 2018; Zamyatin, 2012, 2016). The languages, cultures and histories of minority ethnic groups in Russia, which were previously excluded from teaching, have been included in school curricula. At my field-site, schools have implemented various activities through which children and young people have the possibility to learn about ethnic or regional culture and language. Local educators used various pedagogic techniques to articulate and cultivate ethnic and regional belonging. “Culture” as an objectified cultural construct (Handler, 1984) occupied a central place in these pedagogic efforts. It is through knowledge of and immersion in cultural traditions that educators sought to strengthen commitment among the pupils to their ethnic group. The teaching of culture thus became a pedagogic tool, an educational method used to cultivate a sense of ethnic and/or regional belonging (Coe, 2005; Derlicki, 2005).

A major educational paradigm shift took place at the end of 1990s—beginning of 2000s, with the policies of state consolidation and centralization under the presidency of Putin. The federal government has curtailed regional and ethno-cultural initiatives in education, while simultaneously centralizing, unifying and ideologizing educational policy. The new priorities of public education have once again created demand for pedagogies that mold young people’s dispositions in accordance with state goals. This time it is the patriotic citizen, loyal to the state and educated in the traditional spiritual values of Russia that the school sought to form.

It is at this juncture of changing educational policies and projects of national identity in Russia that this book explores the experiences, meanings and tensions surrounding schooling in one of Volga-Ural’s multi-ethnic settings, a small town in Tatarstan. Two diverging trends—which I term centralization and regionalization—have been playing out in everyday life and in pedagogic practices at the schools studied in my fieldwork (Suleymanova, 2018). Centralizing tendencies in education have particularly affected the educational decision-making of families. As the main way of securing an economic livelihood and social advancement, education often occupies a primary place in family concerns, specifically when it comes to the education of children (Kipnis, 2011). The state has created powerful incentives for local families to opt for Russian-medium education and to maximize exposure to the Russian language among children. This created tensions and sparked conflictual situations at schools, around Tatar language lessons and with regard to the language of instruction used in schools.

At the same time, as I will argue, the consequences of regionalizing policies in education have left their imprint both on the schools themselves and on students’ sense of regional and ethnic belonging. Ethnographies of classrooms reveal that despite strict institutional constraints set by the new educational policy framework, there are various ways in which teachers bring in regional historical narratives. They organize extra-curricular groups and other types of activities that are aimed at cultivating ethnic and regional identity. They engage with children in personal ways as class tutors, sharing their own experiences and influencing pupils’ sense of self-esteem. They expose children to historical narratives which are not included in official representations of the past. Naturally, resources and institutional structures created by the regionalizing policies in education—such as regionally produced textbooks and educational materials—play an important role in enabling this agency of local educators. Without this institutional support many of their activities would not be possible.

While the analysis of textbooks, educational materials and policies reveal political, ideological and bureaucratic aspects of nation-building through schooling, an exploration of the social microcosm of classrooms opens up the possibility of studying the everyday “strategies of belonging”—the ways adolescents understand, deal with and instrumentalize identity categories that are ascribed to them by the school and adults in general. Various ethnographic studies on childhood have argued that children are not empty vessels that can be formed by adults in any ways desired, but rather active agents that construct their own meaning (Jenks, 1996; Toren, 1990). In the post-Soviet context, ethnicity remains the main category of identification and interaction and is also inscribed in many bureaucratic procedures in schools. Ethnographic vignettes and portraits of schoolchildren in the book demonstrate how young people perceive ethnic categories and deal with stigmatizing ascriptions of ethnic identity.

At the same time, an ethnographic perspective uncovers the influences on public education of other institutions, such as—in the context of my fieldwork—Islamic religious school (the madrasa). While not at the center of my study, the madrasa evolved as an important institution for understanding the dynamics and developments of school education in the context of the larger processes of desecularization in post-Soviet Russia. Looking at religious educational institutions and their entanglements with public schools sheds light on the role of religion in changing political and ideological constellations. Adhering to the Soviet idea that society is responsible for the moral education of its young people, local schoolteachers use Islamic precepts as a source of moral values and a disciplining force in the classroom, as well as in extra-curricular practices of moral education.

While representing an instrument of the state for transforming society and the individual, school is at the same a locally embedded institution, that is shaped by local practices, discourses and institutions (Reed-Danahay, 1996; Stambach, 2000, 2009). Through textbooks, curriculum, extra-curricular activities, as well as different pedagogic techniques and ways of interacting with students, various actors seek to expose schoolchildren to particular discourses and kinds of knowledge. As Adely claims, schools as state institutions, are rarely completely successful in their efforts to control the production of knowledge through public education, “as they must contend with other forces in and around school” (2012, p. 20). The ethnographic exploration of schooling uncovers the multitude of agents, discourses and voices that unfold within the classrooms and reveal complexities and tensions in the way education works.

1.1 Education and Pedagogies of Social Transformation

1.1.1 Constructing Identities Through Schooling

World-wide education has been used by the state as an instrument of social transformation (Altinay, 2005; Boli, Ramirez, & Meyer, 1985; Kaplan, 2006; Luykx, 1999; Weber, 1976). Through an extensive network of public schools, the state seeks to disseminate its ideological messages and to transform territories and populations. Specifically, education is a strategic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Education and the Politics of Belonging in Russia
• 2. Producing the Citizen: Political Dynamics of Education in Post-Soviet Russia
• 3. Language, (Multi-)ethnicity and Local Responses to Educational Policies in a Small Tatar Town
• 4. Pedagogies of Culture: Learning to Perform, to Belong and to Remember
• 5. Pedagogy of Islam: Madrasa Education and Moral Upbringing
• 6. “I’m only half!”: Negotiating Identities at School
• 7. Conclusion
• Back Matter