I had to rebuild myself... ': Rural teachers, doctors and forest engineers as knowledge (re)producers

The article explores an interconnected set of practices and policies in education and knowledge transfer and production in a remote post-Soviet Siberian village. Classifications created by the state through the very architecture of the educational system - from rural school to university - are analyzed along with private classifications found in rural teachers' biographical narratives. I investigate those contextual and historical breakdowns and shifts in concepts and classifications that were reinterpreted at the time transformation of professions, niches of work and social hierarchies was taking place, both before and after the collapse of the USSR and the closure of enterprises. The focus is on the phenomenon of 'teacher' and 'intellectual', which informants present as a matter of personal experience and which they criticize as cliches and fixed concepts. Following three different professional trajectories, local residents, vocational school graduates, college graduates and university graduates became rural school teachers and occupied different semantic and value-laden niches. Contrasting their experience and qualifications with those of other teachers allows them draw social boundaries and establish their own identity, both within the village and in the context of Soviet and post-Soviet education. Prescribed educational methods are often contrasted with flexibility and improvisation, competitiveness in secondary education and, in a broader sense, with resistance to different modes and regimes of power in knowledge production and with refusal to reproduce official knowledge.

Keywords

Authors

References