Category: Politics
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The University and the Global Pandemic: In the Eye of the Storm
This week marks the beginning of a new semester in many colleges and universities across the U.S. But unlike other semesters when the first week of classes evoked a sense of joyful anxiety and anticipation, this week has been filled with dread and a sense of a looming disaster. While some colleges and universities announced…
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Masks and Guises
In my book Teacher education reform as political theater: Russian policy dramas, I analyze how in 2014 a small group of Russian reformers enacted teacher education modernization reform despite great opposition from educators and the public. Using rich ethnographic material, the book captures how the official story of improving education obscures a radical change in purposes…
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My Blog
This blog captures a variety of writing projects I have undertaken. Most of the writing presented here is my ongoing work on scholarly and academic projects. These pieces reflect some of the research that I have presented at conferences or that I am preparing for publication in a more extended form. Some of them reflect…
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What is Political Theater?
One way to view educational reform as political theater is from the perspective of theatrics of politics – or observing reformers’ proposals for educational change as a type of dramatic performances, in which reformers as actors (or even directors) attempt to create an illusionary world wrought with problems for which they allegedly identified solutions. Viewing educational…
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Educational Reforms as Political Theater
In the last twenty years, we have witnessed an unprecedented amount of educational reforms around the world that more often than not bear heavy resemblances to each other. Pasi Sahlberg refers to these reforms as GERM – or Global Educational Reform Movement. Governments embark on transforming national education systems to allegedly improve quality and ultimately…
Elena Aydarova 