Competences as Contested Signs: Political Theater of Educational Reforms in the Russian Federation

• In Event: Contesting Competences: Exploring Conceptual and Contextual Dilemmas in Competence-based Education in Europe and Beyond

Proposal

Competence-based reforms have swept around the world (Anderson-Levitt, 2017). International organizations promote soft skills and character traits as key features that schools should develop in students to ensure competitiveness of national economies (Spring, 2015). International assessments like PISA cement this pursuit of competences by using league tables to compare students’ performance and by linking their development with economic advancement (Takayama, 2008; Gorur, 2016). Yet these processes stir much controversy when established educational practices and norms do not align with the competence discourses.

This paper examines the contestations over the notion of competences in the Russian Federation. Data come from policy documents as well as from ethnographic interviews and observations collected in policy-making and teacher education communities between 2011 and 2015. This research focuses on three policies introduced in the last eight years: new school standards, new teacher professional standards, and new teacher education standards. Together these policies work to reorient schooling from knowledge production to character and competence development.

Drawing on Barthes’ (1972) theory of signification in myths and Debord’s (1994) theory of spectacle, this paper analyzes the meanings with which different political and educational groups in Russia imbue competences as contested signs. Reformers who introduced the policies argued that competence-based education would increase the quality of education and allow Russia “to catch up with the rest of the world.” Reformers used Russian students’ performance on PISA to justify the need to reorient the educational system towards “international standards” (Aydarova, forthcoming). Yet the foundation of the competence-based reforms in K-12 sector was the activity-based theory produced by Soviet psychologists and philosophers, such as Shchedrovitsky, El’konin, Davydov, and Asmolov. Unlike competence frameworks circulated internationally (e.g. OECD, 2003; World Bank, 2002), this framework consists of personal, subject, and meta-subject competences (Asmolov, 2009; Ministry of Education, 2011). Higher education, on the other hand, follows the Bologna Process policy directives and the Project TUNING prescriptions that focus on subject specific and generic competences, which are subsequently subdivided into three types: instrumental, interpersonal, and systemic.

Educators whose work was affected by the reforms questioned the legitimacy of these reforms and their eventual outcome. Interpreting the introduction of competences as the process of undermining the quality of education, educators critiqued the fragmentation of learning competence-based frameworks created. The promise of increased educational quality disguised the bifurcation of the system to provide different education to students from diverse socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds. Russian scholars whose studies showed how the new competence-based approaches only further entrenched inequalities in academic achievement among privileged and disadvantaged groups, however, were marginalized and ostracized. Thus, the competence sign came to signify not only a social transformation but also symbolic violence against those who dissented against it.

The contribution of this paper lies in illuminating the contested nature of competence-based reforms in Russia and in subjecting to critique the certainty with which those reforms are introduced into national spaces. It raises questions not only about the changes in educational systems but also about the social transformations that accompany these reforms.

Author

• Elena Aydarova, Auburn University