Memories of (Post)Soviet / (Post)Socialist Schooling and Childhoods

Session Submission Type: Workshop

Description of Session

Scholarly writing on (post)Soviet schooling and childhood has been predominantly produced by cultural outsiders - those who used exogeneous categories to narrate successes or failures of (post)Soviet institutions. The examination of childhood and schooling experiences from the insider positions has been rare, yet it holds great promise for making sense of (post)socialist transformations in the current neoliberal moment (Buyandelgeriyn, 2008). At the time when global educational policies based on Western designs become widely circulated around the globe, an analysis of (post)socialist experiences can be helpful for challenging the taken-for-granted assumptions and for providing spaces for imagining alternatives (Rogers, 2010; Silova, 2010; Millei & Griffith, 2011). To this end, this workshop is designed to bring together those who had first-hand experiences with (post)Soviet/(post)socialist schooling and childhood as cultural insiders to engage in remembering and (re)narrating their experiences.

This workshop creates a space for collaboration, dialogue, and critical conversation to embark on projects of collective biography, autoethnography, autobiography, or oral history. The workshop will be based on critical narrative research that generates memory stories not typically acknowledged as an objective truth (Davies & Gannon, 2006). Through a collective dialogue that works with “the intensities and flows, that collectively, move us”, participants will draw on personal memories, document those and share them for potential data analysis. Different research paradigms might be used to interrogate the dominant discourses of schooling, constructions of childhoods in the narratives, as well as the subject positions made available in the stories in relation to socialist childhoods and institutions. Following research traditions that challenge the canons of positivism and empiricism, the workshop aims to remove the distance between the researcher and the researched (Davies & Gannon, 2006; Ellis, 2004) and erase the boundaries between the personal and the political (Holman Jones, 2008).

As the continuation of last year’s popular workshop, this year’s work will be dedicated to examining memories, narratives, and experiences of (post)Soviet or (post)socialist schooling and childhoods for the purpose of publishing them as a part of a special issue of a journal or an edited volume. More specifically, the purpose of this workshop is two-fold. First, it aims to present current work in progress on this theme, including presentations and discussions of studies based on autoethnography and collective biography. Second, it aims to bring participants together to collectively explore their narratives of (post)Soviet/socialist schooling and childhoods through the shared process of telling, listening, and writing. Activities will also include brainstorming potential themes of interests and narrative sharing. The aim is to explore how childhood and schooling were constituted and experienced in (post)socialist contexts. Childhood as a socio-historical construct provides an analytical incision into the social issues and concerns regarding historical socialism, cultural/ideological changes, and subject formation. As Gonick & Gannon (2014, p.6) argue, “rather than truth of particular lives, … we are interested in using memory stories to examine the ways in which individuals are made social, how we are discursively, affectively, materially constituted in particular moments that are inherently unstable” and to open up ways to explore “how things come to matter in the ways they do” (Davies et al, 2013).

Collective dialogues and writing will allow participants to explore affective attachments and assemblages that shape our understandings of (post)Soviet / socialist childhoods and schooling. In the workshop, the participants will examine - collectively and individually - their own experiences of Soviet/socialist schooling and childhoods by reflecting on lived experiences and memories. Reflecting on their experiences of Soviet/socialist schooling and childhoods - as experienced in different geographical locations - will enable participants to critically re-examine complexities inherent in (post)Soviet/socialist schooling and the making of Soviet/socialist child/student. This method will produce new understandings what Soviet/socialist childhoods mean as an individual and collective experience and as a historical and contemporary representation with significant implications for the global transformations in the current context of neoliberal globalization.

Instructional Staff (in reverse alphabetical order)
Iveta Silova, Lehigh University
Nelli Piattoeva, University of Tampere
Zsuzsa Millei, the University of Newcastle
Olena Aydarova, Michigan State University

A list of equipment or room set-up requirements:
LCD projector and laptop, an overhead projector, a flip-chart and markers, DVD/VCR player, speakers, tape. The room should have enough desks for about 20-25 participants and all furniture should be arranged in a circle.

Sub Unit

• General Pool

Workshop Organizers

• Iveta Silova, Lehigh University

• Zsuzsa Millei, SPARG, The University of Tampere, Finland

• Nelli Piattoeva, University of Tampere

• Olena Aydarova, Michigan State University