?
Teachers Agency Through the Morphogenetic Lens: The Case of Russian-medium Schools in Estonia
Estonia is a bright empirical example of social transformation, which took place right after the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1991. Together with all other domains – the economic sphere, social enterprise and technology – it gained incredible success in education, becoming the leader among OECD member states and inside the EU in PISA results in 2018. The detachment from the Soviet past after Estonia regained its independence followed a twofold logic: the formation of a new social reality pushed the creation of new advanced forms of relationships with international institutions, generating optimistic future scenarios; however, the reconstruction of Estonia’s own collective identity was a deeply intimate and inward process, which oriented the nation towards the past. The most undesired component of this past was connected with the national cultural trauma (Alexander, 2004) and the community that continued to represent it – the Russian-speaking community residing in Estonia (who comprise 26% of the Estonian population to date, according to Statistics Estonia).
Taking ‘cultural tissue’ (Sztompka, 2004), or an ideational level in neo-institutionalist terms (Hay, 2015), as the main domain where the desired transformation always exhibits a certain path-dependency, in this dissertation I approach only one small aspect of this dimension – the parallel education system, which is also a part of Estonia’s past. Even though since 1991 the national education system has gone through the process of being re-created from scratch in terms of its own national, democratic and humanist values (Kesküla et al., 2012; Loogma et al., 2013), it is fair to say that two institutionally divided communities continue to coexist within it: the schools that instruct in Russian, in parallel with the schools that instruct in Estonian. While the latter represent in their own right some kind of ideational transformation that took place in Estonia during the last 30 years, the former (those schools that instruct in Russian) are discursively associated with Soviet pedagogies, lower PISA results at the national level, and a continuing disadvantaged position for graduates in the labour market (Lindemann & Saar, 2012). Teachers in such schools are largely associated in public discourse with the continuous reproduction of their own quite liminal position.
As the subject of this dissertation is the agency of the teachers who teach in schools where the main language of instruction is Russian, I use a qualitative research methodology to approach my sample of interest at the micro level. My aim is to understand why their agentic trajectories unfold in the way they do. Associated with replication and reproduction in public discourses, teachers should also transform something, and I am trying to precisely understand: (1) what exactly they transform; (2) why they do it; and (3) what kind of situational logics (Archer, 1995) generate their agency at the sociocultural level.
I approach the phenomenon with a methodological and theoretical sequence, which is a combination of symbolic interactionism (Blumer, 1969), the middle-range theory of reflexivity (Archer, 2007), and, finally, the grand theory of social morphogenesis (Archer, 1995). In Archer’s terms, all systems go through cycles of transformation or reproduction. The main components of these cycles are particular groups of agents who may advance systems on this or another trajectory. The path of transformation she calls ‘morphogenesis’, while reproduction is termed ‘morphostasis’. Both outcomes are generated through various situational logics, which are in turn created and conditioned by people. When the above-mentioned groups of people do not come to a consensus, the system undergoes continuous destabilization.
Symbolic interactionist methodology and Archer’s components of the theory of reflexivity are my tools for getting as close as possible to the teachers who teach in the schools with Russian as the language of instruction. I attempt to trace these teachers’ intentions through the patterns of their concerns, which result in their micro-projects and finally become established practices.
In the dissertation, I ask the following research questions:
1. What is the ideational environment that shapes the agency of the teachers in these schools in Estonia?
2. What structural and cultural mechanisms are defined by these teachers as shaping their work-related agency?
3. What kind of micro-projects result from these acts of definition?
4. What exactly do these teachers transform in their work-related practices?
5. What kinds of concerns and interpretations supply teachers’ projects and practices with the morphogenetic or morphostatic mode?
I approach the exploration of the ideational environment with a neo-institutionalist lens (Scott, 2013; Hay, 2015) and develop the idea that this layer of culture is extremely inhibiting for the teachers’ agency. It unfolds in the logic of protection (Archer, 1995), where the teachers are seen through certain ‘memory filters’ (Kõresaar, 2015) and are largely associated with the past. This environment generates various situational logics for the teachers themselves, and these logics do not lead to their own transformation, which would result in a desire to cross the boundaries of their own culture. Therefore, at the sociocultural level, it is the ideational content that promotes certain routine solutions for these teachers (Study I).
These teachers define various structural and cultural constraints and enablements for themselves at the regulative, normative and ideational levels (Scott, 2013). The most resourceful aspects of their job come from serving their own community, dealing with children from disadvantaged families (in which they find their mission), and enjoying the pedagogical autonomy given by the state. The most inhibiting practices are connected with the regulation to teach in Estonian, which many teachers find contradictory to their professional credo; the ‘vulnerable position’ of schools instructing in Russian in terms of various policy decisions (primarily the decision to transition into Estonian as the language of instruction); as well as professional development opportunities, which, from the point of view of these teachers, are scarce in Russian. The main constraint, however, is the ideational environment for these teachers. Respondents in my sample quite clearly acknowledge that they are largely associated with ‘obsolete pedagogies’ and conservative value systems, and their responses to this ‘ideational menu’ are many and various. Some teachers protect their status quo, while others act in opposition to this grand systemic narrative (Mikser & Goodson, 2019), which may result in both integration practices and, vice versa, practices of competition with this narrative.
Finally, I attempt to understand what exactly these teachers transform in their work. I develop several clusters of teachers who transform ‘for pedagogy’, ‘for culture’, ‘for community’ and ‘for their own life course’. I see these modes of transformation as intersecting with each other and not pertaining to only one particular portrait but rather dominating in a teacher’s situation or depending on prevailing values. From my results, I understand that these teachers’ transformative projects are tightly connected with their own value commitments, and these commitments can be oppositional to prevailing discourses; therefore, they do not lead to sociocultural cohesion. These teachers may be very transformative in their micro-practices at the level of structure, but they still aim to reproduce culture and even put much effort into acting somewhat as ‘cultural gatekeepers’ for their own community. Even those teachers in the sample who spoke Estonian at a level that would allow them to work in the Estonian-speaking milieu would rather use their language skills to empower colleagues and children from the Russian-speaking community and serve as a bridge between the two ethnolinguistically divided groups.
I see the novelty of this dissertation in its bringing articulate methodology into Archer’s theories while enriching the methodological field of symbolic interactionism with several ambitious theories, such as constructivist institutionalism (Hay, 2015), the theory of reflexivity (Archer, 2007), and the critical realist ‘social morphogenesis approach’ (Archer, 1995). The research also applies Archer’s concept of ‘cultural configurations’ and their situational logics (ibid.) empirically. I believe this dissertation can provide an interesting contribution and a fresh angle into studying the unique relationships that develop between different groups of people whose practices, ideologies, values and ‘memory regimes’ (Kõresaar, 2015) bring them to contradictory path-dependent trajectories and inhibit desired sociocultural cohesion.
