Elena Aydarova
Biographic Data
| ID | 830017 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Elena Aydarova |
| GIVEN NAMES | Elena |
| FAMILY NAME | Aydarova |
| SIGNATURE | AYDAROVA E |
| AFFILIATIONS | Auburn University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0387-2889 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 24 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Cies Provocations Forum
Claiming and reclaiming the voice of the profession: Teacher educator policy advocacy through the lens of Bakhtin's theory of dialogism
What You See Is Not What You Get: Science of Reading Reforms as a Guise for Standardization, Centralization, and Privatization
Purpose: In the last 5 years, many states have introduced science of reading (SOR) reforms that require increased attention to foundational skills instruction in grades K–3. The fast spread of these policies raises questions about the mechanisms that facilitated their rapid adoption. The purpose of this article is to examine how SOR discourses obscured or legitimated agendas of various policy actors involved in promoting literacy reforms. Researc…
Intermediary Organizations, Technocratic Discourses, and the Rise of Accountability Regimes in Teacher Education
Intermediary organizations' (IOs) involvement in teacher education policies has grown in recent years. Apart from advocating for the introduction of alternative routes into the teaching profession, IOs have facilitated the spread of outcomes-based teacher preparation accountability. While previous studies examined the neoliberal market-based logic of their proposals, less is known about technocracy as a discourse informing teacher education redes…
“Whatever You Want to Call It”: Science of Reading Mythologies in the Education Reform Movement
In recent years, a wave of science of reading (SOR) reforms have swept across the nation. Although advocates argue that these are based on science-based research, SOR remains a contested and ambiguous notion. In this essay, Elena Aydarova uses an anthropology of policy approach to analyze advocacy efforts that promoted SOR reforms and legislative deliberations in Tennessee. Drawing on Barthes’s theory of mythology, this analysis sheds light on th…
Shadow Elite of Teacher Education Reforms: Intermediary Organizations’ Construction of Accountability Regimes
In the 2010s, teacher education witnessed the rise of accountability regimes. Studies examining efforts to introduce teacher preparation accountability focused predominantly on federal or state actors, leaving the involvement of intermediary organizations in the construction of these regimes largely underexplored. To address this gap, I analyze nonprofit and for-profit actors’ advocacy for teacher preparation accountability. Using the tools of an…
Playing Chess When You Only Have a Couple of Pawns: Policy Advocacy in Teacher Education
Background: In recent years, intermediary organizations have increasingly influenced educational policy. Among other proposals, they have promoted teacher education redesign based on technocratic values and stringent accountability measures. In response to these policy changes and the intensifying crisis in the teaching profession, teacher educators have been called to engage in policy debates. Yet, to date, few studies have explored how teacher …
Hey! Teachers! Leave the Kids Alone
The Imperative for Social Foundations Revisited: A Technical Comment on Warren and Venzant Chambers (2020)
Warren and Venzant Chambers (2020) raised an important concern about the marginalization and elimination of social foundations of education in educator preparation. Yet, their focus on “an essential tripartite coalition of disciplinary perspectives” encapsulated in sociology, history, and philosophy runs counter the interdisciplinary nature of social foundations
Transform the world or adapt the student: Discursive shifts in the constructions of teachers’ roles and pedagogy in the Russian Federation
Drawing on the analysis of discursive shifts in the constructions of teachers’ roles during the twentieth century in the Russian Federation, this paper argues that pedagogy becomes redefined based on the political elites’ vision for the society’s future. During the Soviet era, teachers were expected to play a key role in social transformation. In order to transform the world, they were expected to deploy humanistic pedagogy to help all students r…
Neoliberal Fictions for the Audit Theater: University Educators and Administrators Navigating Accountability Regimes
This ethnographic story explores fiction-making in the context of audit cultures and accountability regimes. Based on a critical multi-sited ethnography conducted between 2011 and 2015 in the Russian Federation, this composite narrative draws on eighty interviews, casual conversations, and observations at several universities. It documents how educators at higher education institutions responded to audit reviews by constructing paper façades of r…
‘Small but mighty’: A case study of teacher educators disrupting neoliberal reforms of teacher education and reclaiming a voice in policy conversations
As attacks on teacher education mount, teacher educators have been urged to take a more active part in policy deliberations. Yet the question of how teacher educators get their voices heard in policy contexts that are not receptive to their expertise remains underinvestigated. This qualitative case study addresses this gap by exploring the work of a group of teacher educators who engaged in advocacy against the introduction of edTPA as a licensur…
Building a One-Dimensional Teacher: Technocratic Transformations in Teacher Education Policy Discourses
In the context of neoliberal reforms, teacher education policy discourses have shifted away from social justice imperatives toward technocratic approaches. I examine these shifts by applying the tools of critical policy and discourse analysis to accreditation standards and other policy texts of the last decade. Using Marcuse’s theory of one-dimensional subjects, I analyze how teacher education policy discourses position teachers as agents of soci…
Jokers’ pursuit of truth: Critical policy analysis in the age of spectacle and post-truth politics
Critical policy analysis examining how powerful actors use educational policies to reproduce unequal social structures presents many challenges. These challenges are amplified by the politics of spectacle, where duplicity comes to dominate how educational policies are conceptualized, presented to the public, and subsequently enacted. The pursuit of truth in policy proposals or reform designs often entails navigating contentious spaces of fiction-…
Knowledge for the elites, competencies for the masses: Political theatre of educational reforms in the Russian Federation
International organisations facilitated the spread of competency-based reforms around the world. Accepting at face value correlations between students’ performance on international assessments, such as PISA, and nations’ economic development, reformers in different countries began to adopt competency-based standards to improve the quality of education. Hybridising competency discourses circulated by international organisations, Russian reformers …
“I Want a Beautiful Life”: Divergent Chronotopes in English language Teacher Education
Research on second language teacher education (SLTE) has focused on the processes, practices, and contexts of teachers’ learning to teach. The interaction between SLTE and the broader sociopolitical processes has received less attention. To address this gap, the author explores how SLTE programs in Russia have become positioned at the intersections of transnational educational reforms, such as the Bologna Process, and global cultural flows of mig…
Revisiting Pasts, Reimagining Futures: Memories of (Post)Socialist Childhood and Schooling
Global Discourses and Local Responses: A Dialogic Perspective on Educational Reforms in the Russian Federation
In the past twenty years, Russian education has undergone transformations under the influence of global discourses. In this ethnographic study, I draw on Bakhtin’s (1981 Bakhtin, M. (1981). The dialogic imagination. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. [Google Scholar]) theory of dialogue to examine how actors respond to these transformations. The purpose of my study is threefold: to document the emic perspectives on the changes, to reconstruct…
Glories of the Soviet Past or Dim Visions of the Future: Russian Teacher Education as the Site of Historical Becoming
In the 2000s, the Russian Ministry of Education introduced educational modernization reforms built on neoliberal principles. This critical ethnographic study examines how the memories of the Soviet past are being re-narrated to assess the current educational reforms. I use Bakhtin's theory of historical becoming to analyze how the vestiges of the past co-exist with the emerging forms of the neoliberal present and shape how teacher educators and t…
Universal principles transform national priorities: Bologna Process and Russian teacher education
What You See Is Not What You Get: Science of Reading Reforms as a Guise for Standardization, Centralization, and Privatization
Purpose: In the last 5 years, many states have introduced science of reading (SOR) reforms that require increased attention to foundational skills instruction in grades K–3. The fast spread of these policies raises questions about the mechanisms that facilitated their rapid adoption. The purpose of this article is to examine how SOR discourses obscured or legitimated agendas of various policy actors involved in promoting literacy reforms. Researc…
Building a One-Dimensional Teacher: Technocratic Transformations in Teacher Education Policy Discourses
In the context of neoliberal reforms, teacher education policy discourses have shifted away from social justice imperatives toward technocratic approaches. I examine these shifts by applying the tools of critical policy and discourse analysis to accreditation standards and other policy texts of the last decade. Using Marcuse’s theory of one-dimensional subjects, I analyze how teacher education policy discourses position teachers as agents of soci…
Claiming and reclaiming the voice of the profession: Teacher educator policy advocacy through the lens of Bakhtin's theory of dialogism
Jokers’ pursuit of truth: Critical policy analysis in the age of spectacle and post-truth politics
Critical policy analysis examining how powerful actors use educational policies to reproduce unequal social structures presents many challenges. These challenges are amplified by the politics of spectacle, where duplicity comes to dominate how educational policies are conceptualized, presented to the public, and subsequently enacted. The pursuit of truth in policy proposals or reform designs often entails navigating contentious spaces of fiction-…
Glories of the Soviet Past or Dim Visions of the Future: Russian Teacher Education as the Site of Historical Becoming
In the 2000s, the Russian Ministry of Education introduced educational modernization reforms built on neoliberal principles. This critical ethnographic study examines how the memories of the Soviet past are being re-narrated to assess the current educational reforms. I use Bakhtin's theory of historical becoming to analyze how the vestiges of the past co-exist with the emerging forms of the neoliberal present and shape how teacher educators and t…
Universal principles transform national priorities: Bologna Process and Russian teacher education
Intermediary Organizations, Technocratic Discourses, and the Rise of Accountability Regimes in Teacher Education
Intermediary organizations' (IOs) involvement in teacher education policies has grown in recent years. Apart from advocating for the introduction of alternative routes into the teaching profession, IOs have facilitated the spread of outcomes-based teacher preparation accountability. While previous studies examined the neoliberal market-based logic of their proposals, less is known about technocracy as a discourse informing teacher education redes…
The Imperative for Social Foundations Revisited: A Technical Comment on Warren and Venzant Chambers (2020)
Warren and Venzant Chambers (2020) raised an important concern about the marginalization and elimination of social foundations of education in educator preparation. Yet, their focus on “an essential tripartite coalition of disciplinary perspectives” encapsulated in sociology, history, and philosophy runs counter the interdisciplinary nature of social foundations
Neoliberal Fictions for the Audit Theater: University Educators and Administrators Navigating Accountability Regimes
This ethnographic story explores fiction-making in the context of audit cultures and accountability regimes. Based on a critical multi-sited ethnography conducted between 2011 and 2015 in the Russian Federation, this composite narrative draws on eighty interviews, casual conversations, and observations at several universities. It documents how educators at higher education institutions responded to audit reviews by constructing paper façades of r…
Revisiting Pasts, Reimagining Futures: Memories of (Post)Socialist Childhood and Schooling
Global Discourses and Local Responses: A Dialogic Perspective on Educational Reforms in the Russian Federation
In the past twenty years, Russian education has undergone transformations under the influence of global discourses. In this ethnographic study, I draw on Bakhtin’s (1981 Bakhtin, M. (1981). The dialogic imagination. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. [Google Scholar]) theory of dialogue to examine how actors respond to these transformations. The purpose of my study is threefold: to document the emic perspectives on the changes, to reconstruct…
Universal principles transform national priorities: Bologna Process and Russian teacher education
Global Discourses and Local Responses: A Dialogic Perspective on Educational Reforms in the Russian Federation
In the past twenty years, Russian education has undergone transformations under the influence of global discourses. In this ethnographic study, I draw on Bakhtin’s (1981 Bakhtin, M. (1981). The dialogic imagination. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. [Google Scholar]) theory of dialogue to examine how actors respond to these transformations. The purpose of my study is threefold: to document the emic perspectives on the changes, to reconstruct…
Glories of the Soviet Past or Dim Visions of the Future: Russian Teacher Education as the Site of Historical Becoming
In the 2000s, the Russian Ministry of Education introduced educational modernization reforms built on neoliberal principles. This critical ethnographic study examines how the memories of the Soviet past are being re-narrated to assess the current educational reforms. I use Bakhtin's theory of historical becoming to analyze how the vestiges of the past co-exist with the emerging forms of the neoliberal present and shape how teacher educators and t…
Revisiting Pasts, Reimagining Futures: Memories of (Post)Socialist Childhood and Schooling
“I Want a Beautiful Life”: Divergent Chronotopes in English language Teacher Education
Research on second language teacher education (SLTE) has focused on the processes, practices, and contexts of teachers’ learning to teach. The interaction between SLTE and the broader sociopolitical processes has received less attention. To address this gap, the author explores how SLTE programs in Russia have become positioned at the intersections of transnational educational reforms, such as the Bologna Process, and global cultural flows of mig…
Jokers’ pursuit of truth: Critical policy analysis in the age of spectacle and post-truth politics
Critical policy analysis examining how powerful actors use educational policies to reproduce unequal social structures presents many challenges. These challenges are amplified by the politics of spectacle, where duplicity comes to dominate how educational policies are conceptualized, presented to the public, and subsequently enacted. The pursuit of truth in policy proposals or reform designs often entails navigating contentious spaces of fiction-…
Knowledge for the elites, competencies for the masses: Political theatre of educational reforms in the Russian Federation
International organisations facilitated the spread of competency-based reforms around the world. Accepting at face value correlations between students’ performance on international assessments, such as PISA, and nations’ economic development, reformers in different countries began to adopt competency-based standards to improve the quality of education. Hybridising competency discourses circulated by international organisations, Russian reformers …
‘Small but mighty’: A case study of teacher educators disrupting neoliberal reforms of teacher education and reclaiming a voice in policy conversations
As attacks on teacher education mount, teacher educators have been urged to take a more active part in policy deliberations. Yet the question of how teacher educators get their voices heard in policy contexts that are not receptive to their expertise remains underinvestigated. This qualitative case study addresses this gap by exploring the work of a group of teacher educators who engaged in advocacy against the introduction of edTPA as a licensur…
Building a One-Dimensional Teacher: Technocratic Transformations in Teacher Education Policy Discourses
In the context of neoliberal reforms, teacher education policy discourses have shifted away from social justice imperatives toward technocratic approaches. I examine these shifts by applying the tools of critical policy and discourse analysis to accreditation standards and other policy texts of the last decade. Using Marcuse’s theory of one-dimensional subjects, I analyze how teacher education policy discourses position teachers as agents of soci…
Shadow Elite of Teacher Education Reforms: Intermediary Organizations’ Construction of Accountability Regimes
In the 2010s, teacher education witnessed the rise of accountability regimes. Studies examining efforts to introduce teacher preparation accountability focused predominantly on federal or state actors, leaving the involvement of intermediary organizations in the construction of these regimes largely underexplored. To address this gap, I analyze nonprofit and for-profit actors’ advocacy for teacher preparation accountability. Using the tools of an…
Playing Chess When You Only Have a Couple of Pawns: Policy Advocacy in Teacher Education
Background: In recent years, intermediary organizations have increasingly influenced educational policy. Among other proposals, they have promoted teacher education redesign based on technocratic values and stringent accountability measures. In response to these policy changes and the intensifying crisis in the teaching profession, teacher educators have been called to engage in policy debates. Yet, to date, few studies have explored how teacher …
Hey! Teachers! Leave the Kids Alone
The Imperative for Social Foundations Revisited: A Technical Comment on Warren and Venzant Chambers (2020)
Warren and Venzant Chambers (2020) raised an important concern about the marginalization and elimination of social foundations of education in educator preparation. Yet, their focus on “an essential tripartite coalition of disciplinary perspectives” encapsulated in sociology, history, and philosophy runs counter the interdisciplinary nature of social foundations
Transform the world or adapt the student: Discursive shifts in the constructions of teachers’ roles and pedagogy in the Russian Federation
Drawing on the analysis of discursive shifts in the constructions of teachers’ roles during the twentieth century in the Russian Federation, this paper argues that pedagogy becomes redefined based on the political elites’ vision for the society’s future. During the Soviet era, teachers were expected to play a key role in social transformation. In order to transform the world, they were expected to deploy humanistic pedagogy to help all students r…
Neoliberal Fictions for the Audit Theater: University Educators and Administrators Navigating Accountability Regimes
This ethnographic story explores fiction-making in the context of audit cultures and accountability regimes. Based on a critical multi-sited ethnography conducted between 2011 and 2015 in the Russian Federation, this composite narrative draws on eighty interviews, casual conversations, and observations at several universities. It documents how educators at higher education institutions responded to audit reviews by constructing paper façades of r…
“Whatever You Want to Call It”: Science of Reading Mythologies in the Education Reform Movement
In recent years, a wave of science of reading (SOR) reforms have swept across the nation. Although advocates argue that these are based on science-based research, SOR remains a contested and ambiguous notion. In this essay, Elena Aydarova uses an anthropology of policy approach to analyze advocacy efforts that promoted SOR reforms and legislative deliberations in Tennessee. Drawing on Barthes’s theory of mythology, this analysis sheds light on th…
Claiming and reclaiming the voice of the profession: Teacher educator policy advocacy through the lens of Bakhtin's theory of dialogism
What You See Is Not What You Get: Science of Reading Reforms as a Guise for Standardization, Centralization, and Privatization
Purpose: In the last 5 years, many states have introduced science of reading (SOR) reforms that require increased attention to foundational skills instruction in grades K–3. The fast spread of these policies raises questions about the mechanisms that facilitated their rapid adoption. The purpose of this article is to examine how SOR discourses obscured or legitimated agendas of various policy actors involved in promoting literacy reforms. Researc…
Intermediary Organizations, Technocratic Discourses, and the Rise of Accountability Regimes in Teacher Education
Intermediary organizations' (IOs) involvement in teacher education policies has grown in recent years. Apart from advocating for the introduction of alternative routes into the teaching profession, IOs have facilitated the spread of outcomes-based teacher preparation accountability. While previous studies examined the neoliberal market-based logic of their proposals, less is known about technocracy as a discourse informing teacher education redes…
Cies Provocations Forum
Sociology (19 works) · Political science (15 works) · Pedagogy (12 works) · Global Education and Multiculturalism (11 works) · Global Educational Policies and Reforms (10 works) · Law (10 works) · Educator Training and Historical Pedagogy (9 works) · Social science (9 works) · Public Administration (8 works) · Law (7 works)