Teachers and the state: Teacher professionalism as resistance in Soviet and post-Soviet Belarus?

• In Event: Teachers' resistance and protests for a more equitable education system and society

Proposal

Entrusted with the responsibilities of educating next generations of citizens, teachers have always played an important role in the promotion or contestation of ideologies aiding nation-states’ projects (e.g., Markava, 2016), but also resisting them (Compton & Weiner, 2008). Most literature examines teachers’ cooperation with or contestation of the state in the context of the transition from authoritarian to democratic rule where teachers are often positioned as champions of social change and democracy (Cook, 1996; Groves, 2014). The role of teachers in the context of the movement towards the opposite direction, authoritarianism, has been largely unexamined.
Research that does discuss teachers in repressive contexts such as Nazi Germany (Lamberti, 2002) or Imperial (Ruane, 1994; Seregny, 1989) and Stalinist Russia (Ewing, 2002) shows that teachers are not mere puppets of the state and organize for and against it on their own accord. Based on archival sources and analysis of policies, these historical studies shed light on the organizational dynamics of teacher mobilization. However, they do not provide a teachers’ perspective that would help us understand how teachers make sense of their complicated professional duties in repressive states and how this understanding impacts their agency and resistance.
This presentation, based on my ongoing dissertation research, addresses these gaps. It examines teachers’ relationship with the state in the context of Belarus and analyzes its transformation as the country transitioned from Soviet state socialism to the post-Soviet authoritarian dictatorship. Drawing on life history interviews with teachers from Soviet and post-Soviet generational cohorts I examine how Belarusian teachers understand their professional duties, balance them with state’s requirements, and perceive opportunities for resistance available to them. Ultimately, I ask whether teachers’ sense of professionalism can be theorized as resistance and explore its potential for challenging state’s hegemony in education.
Problematizing and theorizing professionalism and teacher resistance in Soviet and post-Soviet contexts
Soviet and post-Soviet contexts present an interesting puzzle for scholars of teacher resistance. In democratic societies that permit open and collective action, teachers often resist the state through unionization and organization of strikes. In the context of more oppressive regimes such as Belarus, teacher strikes were only documented in the early 1990s (Sutherland, 1999) and there is no research evidence on teacher collective resistance after 2000 which might be interpreted as evidence that they do not resist. Moreover, there is a documented pattern of post-Soviet teachers staying in their positions despite worsening material and economic conditions and decline in the status of teaching (Eklof, 1993; Long & Long, 1999). The meaning behind teachers’ decision to stay is not well understood. Additionally, there has been no attempt to examine whether staying constitutes resistance and whether teachers who stay unquestionably support the state’s educational project or find opportunities to subvert it.
In his study of post-Soviet teachers Niyozov (2004) suggested that teachers stay because they see themselves as sources of knowledge and morality and feel professional obligations towards their students and the society. Oral histories of Soviet teachers also indicate that it is through this appeal to professionalism that they legitimized teaching what they saw appropriate to their students’ needs and ignored state’s directives (Millei, 2013; Zounek et al., 2018). These studies suggest the need to better theorize teacher professionalism, its relationship to resistance in the Soviet and post-Soviet context and understand its consequences. When teachers stay in schools because of their strong sense of professionalism, do they contribute to the state educational project or undermine it? More accurately, can professionalism be theorized as resistance to the state or as an obstacle to collective teacher resistance? Additionally, considering that the teaching profession is predominantly comprised of women, what role does gender play in teacher resistance in a patriarchal society where clearly demarcated rules and norms of behavior are differentiated by gender and allow agency to men while denying it to women?
My research is guided by the broader post-Soviet sociological and anthropological literature that warns against the uncritical use of binary categories like oppression and resistance or the state and the people. Yurchak (2006) argues that such binary framework overlooks the complex pattern of meanings, values and actions promoted by the state but creatively reappropriated by people in ways that potentially undermine state’s goals in the long term. Thus, through in-depth interviews with teachers, I examine their meaning-making in order to understand how they reconcile official state demands for more authoritarian teaching and support of state ideology with personal and societal aspirations for more democratic and humanistic education. Ultimately, I hope to develop a more context-appropriate theoretical perspective on teacher resistance and teacher engagement with the state to improve our understanding of teacher agency and resistance in non-democratic contexts.

Author

• Kate Antanovich, Pennsylvania State University