Inclusion against stress: Higher education for representatives of the indigenous peoples of Russia

This article problematizes the organization of higher education for indigenous minorities, considering alternative strategies, namely segregation and inclusion, at the theoretical and empirical levels. Based on the analysis of publications by Russian and foreign researchers, representatives of indigenous peoples are presented as one of the categories, along with students from remote regions and from families with low socioeconomic status, whose opportunities for higher education are limited by a number of economic and social factors. The empirical study focuses on a group of Komi-Permyak (one of the indigenous ethnic groups of the Russian North) students studying in a large industrial city, Perm. The Department of Komi-Permyak Language and Literature of the Faculty of Philology at the Perm State University of Humanities and Pedagogy (PSUHP) provides professional training for teachers majoring in “Native (Komi-Permyak) Language and Literature and the Russian Language”. In addition to pedagogical disciplines, the curriculum includes a wide range of disciplines related to the linguistic aspects of the Komi-Permyak language, literature and regional studies. In the course of the interdisciplinary study, indicators of cortisol and anxiety levels -markers of stress response - were obtained. Their comparison with the same indicators of Russian students of other faculties of the same university (N=268) allowed us to conclude that Komi-Permyak students are adapted to the learn- © Козлова М.А., Козлов А.И., Корниенко Д.С., 2022 ing conditions. This fact distinguishes this group from students from other ethnic minorities of the Arctic and subarctic regions who study at other universities. The data provided by the department's administration on the composition of students indicate a low dropout rate of Komi-Permyaks, which indicates that the main factor of educational inequality in relation to this category of students has been overcome. The second stage of the study, carried out in a qualitative methodology (semi-structured interviews, N=9), analyzed aspects of the biographical situation, including migration experience, features of the organization of the educational process and individual strategies of education-al/career formation and building social ties within and outside the ethno-cultural community. Based on the barriers identified in the narratives of the informants and new opportunities for integration into a new sociocultural environment, the key factors of successful adaptation of indigenous students to learning conditions are reconstructed. On the basis of the obtained data, a conclusion is made about the adaptive and integrative potential of soft strategies of educational inclusion, which involve the creation of conditions that allow an individual to independently vary the degree of cultural closeness-openness and social inclusion-exclusion.

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