Values, imaginaries and policy-making for teacher education: Insights from researching the Russian federation context of reform, 2000-17

Abstract

The paper presents insights drawn from researching the discursive construction between 2000 and 2017 of new values-systems that guide, and force, change in Teacher Education within Higher Education in the Russian Federation. It considers particularly the imaginaries and values that underpin official policy documents related to Higher Teacher Education within the broader field of educational policy across this time scale of almost two decades. The central focus rests on the challenge of researching the construction of a driving discursive context for change, subsequently consolidated through the activities of the Modernisation of Teacher Education Project (MoTEP) which was officially launched by the Ministry of Education and Science in 2014. It is not the intention of this paper to discuss in any great detail the nature and practice of Russia’s Teacher Higher Education in itself; for this we suggest Sobolev’s (2016) excellent account. Rather, we focus on what can be learnt from researching an aspect of one of the most intriguing and grand-scale policy-led projects of our time; the rehabilitation of Russia as a global power. The research underpinning the paper draws on Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) to explicate the nature and detail of the changes being promulgated and the construction of these through policy work. It does so by evaluating a series of key policy documents and discursive events that seek to redefine discursively the values-base of teacher education in the Federation. For this, a discourse historical approach (DHA) is used, drawing primarily on the ideas of Krzyżanowski (2010) and Reisigl and Wodak (2001; 2017). Sitting within the critical discourse studies tradition this approach provides our guiding theoretical perspective and informs the research methodology. Our analysis suggests that the values-system and imaginaries of teacher education are strongly reliant on a unique and highly contextualised discursive construction and a legitimation of policy-actions by means of references to strategies and visions for the ‘competitive, innovative and leading economy’, and that the imaginaries and values that underpin Higher Teacher Education in the Russian Federation, are challenging to research because they are considerably more complex and multifaceted than much of the reform activity assumes.