Book chapter
«Человеку с прекрасной душой». Идентичность советского учителя в зеркале собственной биографии
In book
Main focus of this article is on narrative representation of the school discipline (student resistance, incompliance and conflicts with teachers) in Russian school folklore and official school documents in the second half of the 20th century. Two genres of school jokes (written and oral), school rules and official lists of allowed punishments were compared. Concept of discipline is operationalized as disciplinary episodes depicting student infringements or disciplinary acts (punishments) taken by teachers. Distribution of infringements and punishments among studied genres and genre differences in perspective on the same disciplinary episodes discover subtle borders between official and unofficial view on discipline in Soviet school. Also I suggest several semantic categories, guiding narrative representation of school discipline: isomorphism of disciplinary and schooling processes, risk involved in initiating disciplinary conflict, connection between discipline and everyday school routine, internal structure of disciplinary system (hierarchy of punishments).
School teacher profession requires salient and intensive professional identity. From group focused interviews on professionalism criteria all the controversies in normative (self)descriptions were systematically selected to show that any apparent contradiction actually include two different discourses: of negative and positive freedom (using Isaiah Berlin’s terms). The first discourse reflects a tendency to escape from heteronomous invasions, the second one — a drive to construct a professional identity autonomously. The case represents institutional situations with a disturbed equilibrium between external and internal regulation in professional identity (re)production.
The publication is devoted to a problem of professional self-determination, expansion of diagnostic and consulting toolkit, contains the description of a projective technique genogramm, used in psychological consultation with a view of development of professional identity of the client. The opportunity of application of a method at initial and later stages professional is shown.
The article reviews the development of Soviet psychology at the beginning of the 20th century and its contemporary school viewed through the prism of thriving global psychology. The development process is considered to be influencing the establishment of operational approach in Soviet education.