Between Regionalisation and Centralisation: The Implications of Russian Education Reforms for Schooling in Tatarstan

Enacting the contested past: conflict narratives in educational spaces

“…of the Tatars as a "titular" 3 nationality and the interests of Russians, who make up almost half of the population and look towards the federal center in support for their claims 4 . These, sometimes divergent, interests have been unfolding particularly in educational, cultural, and linguistic spheres (Graney, 2010;Suleymanova, 2017). Thus, the fact that the Russian and Tatar languages were proclaimed as official languages of the republic and had to be studied in equal amounts at schools have been contested by certain segments of the Russian-speaking population (Suleymanova, 2017).…”

“…Moreover, from the 2000s onwards there was a process of increasing unification and centralization of school curricula across Russia for the sake of strengthening patriotic sentiments and fostering identification with the Russian nation-state; the process left almost no space in the curriculum for the representations and narrations of nonRussian minority identities (Piattoeva, 2009;Prina, 2015;Suleymanova, 2017;Zamyatin, 2012).…”

“…The official government of Tatarstan has increasingly distanced itself from the commemoration of the conquest of Kazan and the image of the conquest has been increasingly marginalized in the public discourse (Derrick, 2012). Russian educational reforms (specifically the eradication of the regional component of curriculum in 2007) resulted in, for example, taking out the subject of the history of Tatarstan from the school curriculum in Tatarstan (Suleymanova, 2017;Zamyatin, 2012). Even though the new Russian curriculum structure has significantly curtailed the possibilities of transmitting alternative narratives in the classroom, during my ethnographic fieldwork at schools in a provincial town in Tatarstan I could 6 In November 1992, a group of Tatar nationalists and Muslim activists published an open letter to then-President Shaimiev, claiming that the churches in the Kazan Kremlin were built "on the graves of Tatars their mosques" and demanded a monument in the Kremlin dedicated to the Tatars who died defending it in 1552 (Graney, 2007, p. 21). observe how memories about the past that do not fit easily with official historic representations could be brought into the classroom.…”

“…Curriculum, tests, textbooks, and other educational materials (available only in the Russian language) were handed down from the federal educational ministry in Moscow. There was an increasing pressure on the school to focus on the transmission of Russia-centered identity narratives (Piattoeva, 2009;Suleymanova, 2017), a situation created by the eradication of the regional component from the school curriculum, which has foreseen special curricular hours on subjects and contents related to the region (for example for teaching local languages and histories), and by the introduction of new examination procedures which prohibited pupils to take their exams in languages other than Russian (the so-called Unified State Examination). Thus, there is presently no such subject as the history of Tatarstan in the school curriculum and pupils can learn something about the history of their region only within the framework of the Russian history course.…”

Trilingualism, Bilingualism and Educational Achievements: The Case of Chuvash and Tatar in Rural Russia

“…Of these, 33 are reported to be languages of instruction, however, they are used by a small minority of ethnic minority students, and mostly in primary school [Tishkov et al 2009]. Subsequently, many concerns have been expressed about the results of the recent educational reforms, especially about the introduction of a new Unified State Exam (USE) for high school graduation, which has been pointed out to be an important cause of the sharp drop in the use of minority languages as a medium of education [Chevalier 2017;Prina 2016;Suleymanova 2018;Tishkov, Stepanov 2017].…”