Neoliberal Economics in Teachers’ Discourse in post-Soviet Russia

• In Event: Neoliberalism and Globalization

Proposal

Drawing on the case of Russia’s post-Soviet education reform, the presentation explores the origins, evolution and effects of grassroots resistance to educational commercialisation among Russian school teachers. The analysis demonstrates how the market values of competitive individualism, material profit and entrepreneurship were left under-conceptualised in the official post-Soviet reform narrative and consequently rejected in the pedagogical discourse in favour of domestic values of egalitarianism, collegiality, moral education (vospitanie) and subjective student assessment. By way of illustration, the presentation examines teachers’ interpretation of the neoliberal concept of the teaching profession as a ‘commercial service’ vis-à-vis the indigenous concept of teaching as ‘putting one’s soul into teaching.’

The analysis intersects discourse-oriented studies and studies of neoliberal globalisation in education. As for discourse studies, it draws on the conceptualisation of ‘discourse-driven’ social change (Ball 1994; Van Dijk 2001; MacLure 2003; Weiss & Wodak 2003; Chouliaraki & Fairclough 1999), and interpretative policy analysis (Lemke 1995; Yanow 1996), viewing policy as discourse and policy interpretation as an important variable of social change. As both a tool and an indicator of social change, discourse reveals the extent to which policy scripts have been internalised by local agents. The persistent intractability of certain social issues and bottom-up societal resistance are often rooted in contestations over symbolic meanings made by the interpretative community in a particular policy space.

As for neoliberal globalisation in education, I draw on the concept of ‘actually existing neoliberalisms’ (Brenner & Theodore 2002; Peck and Tickell 2002, Collier 2005, Hirt, Sellar & Young 2013), with the main thesis being that neoliberalisation is not a hegemonic project but rather an open-ended process of mutual renegotiation and embeddedness. The discursive interaction between educational globalisation and indigenisation calls forth significant ideological tensions, triggering unexpected local responses and resulting in complex, nuanced and often contradicting articulations of neoliberalism, or its “actually existing” manifestations.

Gassroots pushback against neoliberal reforms in education is especially pronounced in former social welfare states, where such neoliberal concepts as managerialism, commercialisation and individual choice have been interpreted in strong opposition to historical values of egalitarianism, philanthropy and state paternalism (Bronwyn & Bansel, 2007, Eagleton-Pierce, 2016, O’brien 2017). Creative appropriation and resistance are a natural part of neoliberalisms occurring ‘on the ground’ (Hirt, Sellar & Young 2013).

Specifically to the Russian context, neoliberal reforms have been conceptualised as a compromise between maintaining social protection and “selectively reconfiguring material structures, demographic patterns, and social norms” (Collier 2005: 3). Bringing the two theoretical approaches together, I delve into teachers’ discourse on neoliberal economics as a site of resistance, adaptation and re-negotiation of policy meanings.

Methodologically, the analysis draws on thirty-eight in-depth interviews and six focus groups with school teachers conducted in Moscow and Rostov-on-Don throughout 2017-2018. The evolution of resistance is traced on the basis of policy discussions on teacher forums and in popular media throughout 2000-2017. The official discourse is reconstructed based on official policy statements, normative documents and education laws from 1991 to 2017.

The empirical analysis unpacks the cultural logics of resistance to education as ‘service,’ shows how it is maintained and normalised in the pedagogical discourse and discusses specific historical interpretative frames that continue to serve as a discursive backbone for teachers’ resistance to educational commercialisation.

The analysis of the official framing of education as a commercial service unveils a narrowly defined textbook version of educational commercialisation. Market-based ideas of ‘the provision of service,’ ‘competition’ and ‘choice’ were employed as conceptual rationalisations for the introduction of market mechanisms into education. The market paradigm was positioned as universal, value-neutral and ideology-free. By means of rhetorical substitution, the official discourse established an implicit equivalence between private profit and public good, blurring the boundaries between the two and suggesting the two coexist organically in the new socio-economic order. The rhetorical substitution of ‘education’ with ‘educational service’ has driven the otherwise viable idea of partial educational commercialisation to its extreme: not only there is free market in education but there is nothing but market.

The analysis also identified a number of the interpretative frames that structure the teachers’ discourse on ‘educational service’ and contextualised these frames against a larger cultural backdrop. I argued that the poles of opposition identified within these frames appear to correspond to various discourse formations, including early- and late-industrial and Soviet, earlier described by anthropological and sociological literature. These oppositions index a continuing discursive contest between a traditional, collegial, communal, egalitarian, non-material, state-paternalistic, and heavily etatist worldview on the one hand and a market-driven, competitive, individualistic, entrepreneurial and materialistic one on the other. The findings call for a further investigation of the role of the teachers’ - and more broadly, public resistance in the recent reversal of policy course in Russia: from a re-conceptualisation of education in terms of a ‘market of educational services’ to a renunciation of the concept and calls for the restoration of the preceding educational order.

The presentation concludes with a discussion of the role of the state in transmitting neoliberal policy ideas to the teacher community and the trickle-up effect of cultural resistance on the reform process and policy formation in Russia, post-Soviet contexts and beyond. Theoretically, the analysis feeds into the scholarship on the interaction between borrowed reformatory solutions and indigenous culture and pedagogy in the process of neoliberal educational modernisation, highlighting the workings of the ‘trickle up’ effect in social policy formation.

Author

• Elena Elena Minina, Institute of Education, Higher School of Economics