Pedagogies of Culture: Schooling and Identity in Post-Soviet Tatarstan, Russia (by Dilyara Suleymanova)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Pedagogies of Culture: Schooling and Identity in Post-Soviet Tatarstan, Russia by Dilyara Suleymanova Elmira Akhmetova Pedagogies of Culture: Schooling and Identity in Post-Soviet Tatarstan, Russia Dilyara Suleymanova Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, 208 pages School education is one of the critical structures where the state implements its projects of social and political transformation. Governments commonly seek to shape political subjectivities and to inculcate a new set of civic values and commitments through public education. Hence, public education is a strategic arena for the state in its aspirations to shape loyalties and construct categories of identification that go beyond local, ethnic, or religious affiliations toward an institutionalized state-centered national identity. It is crucial for the processes of state formation not only to create bureaucratic institutions, but also to induce in individuals the belief that they are citizens of the state and they belong together. At the same time, the centralized educational system with its state-level aspirations may cause a dilemma for the cultural and ethnic minorities as their own local and regional appeals could be overshadowed under the state-centered national identity formation process. Such a dilemma is explored by Dilyara Suleymanova in the new book entitled Pedagogies of Culture: Schooling and Identity in Post-Soviet Tatarstan, Russia. The discussion is based on an ethnographic fieldwork research conducted in two schools (one Russianmedium and the other Tatar-medium) and a madrasah in a small semi-urban settlement in the northeastern part of Tatarstan, a Muslim-majority autonomous region within Russia. This new volume accordingly offers insights into the life of a peripheral location in post-Soviet Russia, marked by ethnic, religious, and linguistic diversity. Education here is envisaged as an institution that seeks to form, transform, and reproduce the sense of identification and belonging among children and youth, thus envisioning to shape political attitudes and cultural attachments within society. The book consists of seven chapters. In chapter 1, the author introduces the reader to Tatarstan and its educational projects. Chapter 2 provides [End Page 113] a comprehensive observation of educational policies, developments, and projects that have been implemented in Tatarstan since the collapse of the Soviet Union to promote regional and ethnic identity formation. The author divided this period into two parts: (a) the era of sovereignization and ethno-cultural revitalization (from the 1990s to the early 2000s), and (b) the era of centralization of public education under the presidency of Vladimir Putin. During the first period, educational policy projected to construct a distinct regional identity and post-Soviet Tatar nationhood that involved the revitalization of the Tatar language, culture, and religion. The regional components such as Tatar language lessons and the course on the history of the Tatars became one of the focus areas of the republic's educational policy and curriculum. School knowledge and textbooks became more localized with local and regional cultural, religious, and historical cases. Students got involved in various classroom and extracurricular activities related to their immediate locality (city, town, village) and their region. Thus, Suleymanova observes that, in the case of post-Soviet Tatarstan, the regional component created an institutional framework and a discursive space within which regional, local, and ethnic notions of belonging could be promoted and forged. In this way, as the author suggests, the regional component presented one of the most important instruments in forging and constructing not only a regional identity, but also an ethno-national identity among school students. A person with a consolidated ethnonational consciousness will naturally strive to learn his/her ethnic language, culture, and traditions and thus contribute to the Tatar ethnonational revival. As a result, this era produced a new cohort of young people with a strong sense of ethnic and regional identity and high levels of activism. The same chapter also observes the failure of all these achievements in constructing ethno-national identity in Tatarstan due to the new policies of centralization and homogenization under the presidency of Putin, which resulted in the elimination of the regional component and the introduction of the new federal education standards. Chapter 3 discusses the role of schools in the practices of "reinventing ethnic cultures" of local communities. Based on the experience of two particular...