In the last twenty years, many countries around the world embarked on reforming teacher education to make it more practice-oriented, skill-based, and school-focused. Reformers often draw on crisis narratives constructed with the help of international assessments, such as PISA or TIMSS, in order to adopt globally-circulated policy scripts. While these trends appear internationally with steady regularity, little attention has been paid to the actual processes that unfold when teacher education – long perceived as a nationally-oriented institution – becomes reoriented towards global designs. This dissertation attempts to fill this gap by using the lens of political theater to examine the processes of policy formation and contestation around teacher education modernization in the Russian Federation. In the fall of 2013 and spring of 2014, I conducted a multi-sited critical ethnography in three different cities in the Russian Federation. Located in these cities were a policy-making hub and two teacher education universities. My data sources included 70 interviews with various stake-holders, nine focus groups with teacher education students, and over 50 classroom observations. In addition to site research, I was a participant-observer in several academic and public events. I also collected archival documents, policy proposals, academic publications, and mass media materials that focus on teacher education reforms during the Soviet and post-Soviet eras.The conceptual framework of political theater used in this dissertation is based on the theories of performance (Goffman 1974, 1959), social drama (Turner 1974), political spectacle (Debord 1994; Edelman 1988), and theater (Boal 1979). This framework is helpful for revealing what is made (in)visible for the audience during the staging of a modernization drama that seeks to introduce social change through teacher education reforms. I explore how policy-makers employ role-reshuffling to disguise who directs reform processes; how masks are used to cover policy’s intended outcomes; how selective focus draws the audience’s attention towards “low quality” teacher education and away from the social change desired by the private sector. I also trace the role of international scripts, such as the McKinsey report (Barber and Mourshed 2007), in reformers’ production and examine the performances that occur within pedagogical universities that are the target of the current reforms. Ultimately, I show that the preponderance of imitation and profanation at educational institutions make unlikely the social change desired by the reformers and the private sector. The significance of this study lies in offering new lens through which to examine teacher education reforms. The conceptual framework of political theater disrupts assumptions about policy-making processes and their likely outcomes. It also affords opportunities to examine policy texts and policy actors’ performances along political, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions. Overall, the modernization dramas unfolding in the Russian Federation raise questions about the future of teacher education in Russia and in other contexts.
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