Russian-speaking children and material needs in the reformist context: an ecological study of curriculum development

1. Introduction

Russian is the language of the home for approximately one million people living in the USA (Ryan 2013). The Russian language has been designated as one of the “critical languages” necessary in the twenty-first century by the US National Security Education Program and the US businesses (Duggan 2009). The national and familial needs to support and promote Russian have led to a few elementary programs in the USA; but without high demand in the American book market for materials, teachers are often forced to spend hours translating English materials into Russian. Their translations can be inaccurate and time is lost for instructional planning. This study focuses on the need of a Russian faculty in an elementary school to gain textbooks for the children of the Russian-speaking community in a western state of the USA, and the steps parents took to ensure their students had appropriate materials.

Students’ second language ability as gained through immersion programs has been criticized for lacking cultural relevance and social utility (Auger 2002; Lyster 1987; Singh 1986). Researchers have questioned the appropriateness of instructional materials in immersion classrooms that are designed for native speakers of a language (Auger 2002; Lyster 1987, 2007). However, as Genesse (1994) pointed out, while the language skills of immersion students were limited it did not limit the students’ academic development. The Russian-speaking parents, who enroll their children in the immersion program that is the focus of this study, bring with them a high regard for the language development fostered in an academic context.

The strong educational tradition of the Soviet Union was set forth in the Constitution of 1918 that stated, “For the purpose of guaranteeing to the workers real access to knowledge, the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic sets itself the task of furnishing full and general free education to the workers and poorest peasantry” (Russian Constitution 1918, 7). The Constitution of the Russian Federation continues this tradition of free education as a right of citizens in Chapter 2, Article 43 (1993). This stands in stark contrast to the US Constitution that makes no mention of education at all. Seventy-four percent of the Russian immigrants to the USA have 5–6 years of university education (Isurin 2011, 38), and Russian families place high importance on the maintenance of the language with 71% viewing it as essential for their children (216). Therefore, a formal education in the language of the home is not necessarily confined by the scholars’ constructs of “social” and “academic.” A dual language school supports these Russian immigrants’ cultural history of education as a right, rather than a privilege, which was only agreed upon in 1948 by the United Nations General Assembly.

2. Background to study

The full immersion Russian program discussed in this article is situated in the Western USA in a public charter school. After I enrolled my child, VK, in the schools’ kindergarten, a parent who had a child in the first grade approached me. She was extremely concerned about the lack of books in all the Russian grades above kindergarten. After speaking with several teachers, I learned that the primer my child would use in the kindergarten had been brought to the USA in a teacher’s suitcase: There were only 17 books available to 32 students. Since I am committed to multilingualism, including fostering it in my own child, I agreed to help.

My research interest in VK’s language development had already led me to the work of scholars working in a Systemic Functional Linguistic framework (Halliday 1977, 2009; Painter 1984), and in autoethnographic methods (Chang 2008). Chang asserts that “you can study others as the primary focus, yet also as an entry to your world” (65). VK’s Russian emerged first from her home language environment strengthened by extended time with her father, the primary caregiver. Her English eclipsed her Russian in her third year due to the dominance of the language in her preschool experience. In that year, we began to drive her every Sunday for 1 hour to (and from) a Russian language center to engage VK in a broader social context for this nondominant, or minority, language of the USA. After 2 years, my partner and I committed to having VK educated in an English/Russian dual language program requiring a household move. I have over 30 years of experience as a teacher. My educational background is in English as an additional language, literacy, and linguistics. I hold a professorship in education at a midsized university; however, my connection to VK brought me into the context of schooling from the perspective of a parent.

The dyad, or two-person system, is a basic unit of analysis in Urie Brofenbrenner’s ecological systems theory for human development (1979, 5). His 1979 theory consists of four systems “conceived as a set of nested structures, each inside the next, like a set of Russian dolls” (3), or “matryoshka,” the carved wooden dolls that nestle inside each other. As Figure 1 shows, the individual person lies at the innermost level within the microsystem of small social groups – such as family, classmates, school peers, play groups – that pattern activities and roles within an experience of interpersonal relationships (22). The dyad of parent and child lies in the microsystem. Interactions between and among microsystems occur within the mesosystem. The exosystem refers to “settings that do not involve the developing person as an active participant, but in which events occur that affect, or are affected by,” what happens in the microsystem (25). For example, the Russian strand for educating VK is situated in a school that teaches three other languages, and is controlled by a corporation’s management board rather than an elected school board.

Figure 1.

Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory (1979) and framework for study

The attitudes and ideologies underlying consistencies in the lower systems of Bronfenbrenner’s theory make up the macrosystem of a culture. For example, in the Russian Ministry of Education’s suggested curriculum a student should begin the study of their first “foreign” language at grade two for a minimum of 2 hours a week. In the USA, with no national curriculum, foreign/world language study becomes the responsibility of the parent(s) of a student if valued at all. In fact, the USA has a long history of nativism and English dominance that led to the elimination of a vibrant bilingual school culture with the onset of the World Wars (Skutnabb-Kangas and Phillipson 1995; Pavelenko 2011). The Russian educational establishment places a high value on world languages and communicates this through the school curriculum, while the US educational establishment is more at odds about the importance of, or need for, the study of languages. Regardless, the US businesses and portions of the USA Government, as stated in their joint publication (Duggan 2009) are interested in developing a multilingual work force that includes Russian and other less taught languages.

Since the interest in minority languages in the USA is recovering from a long period of dormancy, the public school I have been working with struggles. The reformist movement positions schools as “failing,” educators as “needing help,” and the American educational system as “in need of repair” (Ravitch 2013; Sidorkin 2009). The resulting charter schools, as Ravitch points out, are no better or worse than neighborhood schools; and, in the charter with this Russian language strand the corporate board president and the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) identified their philosophy as “reformist” (public meeting notes, 2 April 2014), adopting a business model with plans for expansion to manage more schools.

This “education as business” stance is a rather late development in the US education. The history of education as a social movement in the USA can be broken down into three major eras: the progressive period of 1890–1960, the civil rights period of 1960–1980, and the reformist period of 1983 to present. While the first two eras pushed for the inclusion of more people into the formal educational process, the reformist movement began with the publication of A Nation at Risk (1983 in Berube and Berube 2007). In the title of this federally commissioned report from the Reagan administration, a reader can see that the focus shifted from educational opportunity for children to a discourse of problems and an entire nation “at risk” of failure. While the report ends with five recommendations, it is second recommendation on standards that has been taken up most aggressively by heads of business. Education scholar Mercedes K. Schneider (2015) outlines this early history and the later 2002 law, No Child Left Behind, tied standards to annual testing. If school students could not perform well on the examinations (administered only in English), the school could be turned over to a private management company or be closed. States then began to pass charter school laws, allowing private businesses and individuals to propose building schools with public money in alignment to a mission statement they craft. Although charter schools were originally conceived of in the civil rights period as a type of school-within-a-school to serve the needs of a particular group of students who required additional or unique instruction as teachers saw fit (Kahlenberg and Potter 2015), the reformist charter schools are separate from other public schools in a community; and, they are associated with resegregation and the exclusion of black and special needs students (Rich 2016). The majority of Americans have come to distrust the charter schools and want greater oversight of them to ensure transparency (In the Public Interest 2016). Education historian Diane Ravitch, who was an advocate for privatization in the 1980s, 1990s, and the turn-of-the-century, changed her position in 2006 and now refers to this period as the “Reign of Error” (2013). With privatization has come corruption and many of the good recommendations listed as sub-points within A Nation at Risk have been lost. For example, the government document encourages study of foreign languages in elementary schools, but such schools are still a rarity in the USA and English continues to dominate the public sphere.

The school in this study provided the English literacy teachers with books for read aloud, guided reading, and independent reading, while non-English instructors were expected to create materials on their own or with the volunteerism of students’ parents. The injustice of this arrangement was not lost on the Russian teachers who in the first year of the schools’ functioning requested materials only to be told that if they could not create materials then the Russian program should be closed. These teachers made due for 3 years photocopying book pages and translating materials on their own before my family arrived at the school. As a professor of literacy, who has taught a total of 5 years in countries of the former Soviet Union, I was unwilling to settle for materials that were less aesthetically pleasing than what the children would see in their English classes. Therefore, this study focuses on how a Russian language program in an elementary school transitioned from untrained translator materials to print texts written by native Russian disciplinary experts. Two questions guided this study:

• How does the ecological context impede or support the instructional need for appropriate language materials for Russian in a school with four world languages of instruction?

• What steps are necessary to gain printed materials in a less commonly taught language?

The hypothesis that appropriate materials could be located for a Russian immersion program in the USA demanded a research design that would take into account the entire school and the macrosystem of American society; therefore, an ethnographic approach was chosen for this study. The emphasis on the interrelationship between language and society situates this research within the broader field of sociolinguistic scholarship, particularly the work of M.A.K. Halliday who posits context as “a constellation of meanings deriving from the semiotic system that constitutes a culture” (2007, 180).

3. The (auto)ethnographic approach

This study focuses on a small Russian program in a public charter school with a 3-year history serving approximately 165 students and five teachers in the western USA. I will use the pseudonym Skoole from this point forward for the school serving students ages 5–13. The Russian program is one of the four world languages that are taught in the school of 500 students at the time of the study. The corporate board president and the CEO, both white with no Asian heritage, had children in the Mandarin Chinese strand. Spanish is the largest program with approximately 120 new kindergarten students every year. Russian is the smallest program with approximately 30 new kindergarten students each year, and with the largest portion of heritage speakers at 80%. All students also study English.

The ethnographic tradition of contributing to existing research through rich description and prolonged time in the field is extended through autoethnography. “In contrast to more traditional ethnographic forms, autoethnographic writing is based upon and emerges from relationship and context” (Anderson and Glass-Coffin 2013, 57). As linguist M.A.K. Halliday has pointed out, “Every act of meaning has a context of situation, an environment within which it is performed and interpreted” (2009). Choices in action, including language, are context specific and autoethnography demands that researchers recognize and write about their involvement in the culture. As stated above, I had already begun studying VK’s language development when a need for Russian reading materials in the school was brought to my attention. It was my empathy with another mother’s concern about a lack of Russian books for her children, and the history of the Russian teachers’ struggles with the appointed school board that compelled my response to work with this community to gain better instructional materials. The characteristics that distinguish autoethnography from other types of personal writing “include (1) purposefully commenting on/critiquing of culture and cultural practice, (2) making contributions to existing research, (3) embracing vulnerability with purpose, and (4) creating a reciprocal relationship with audiences” (Holman Jones, Adams, and Ellis 2013, 22). More specifically, within this document, I (a) comment on the American cultural practices in a school catering to a vulnerable immigrant population, (b) contribute to the research related to language immersion programs and instructional materials, (c) embrace my vulnerability as an American-born education scholar/researcher with a child enrolled in the school, and (d) attempt to create a relationship with you, the reader, to heighten your awareness of the issues concerning minority language programs in the USA and issues related to charter schools. Since the research report genre is traditionally constructed with a tenor that increases social distance through generalized participants and sentence constructions that obfuscate agency (Rose and Martin 2012; Swales 1990), a report makes a relationship more difficult with you, the reader. For that reason, this research report blends elements of a narrative in first person with the report genre (Derewianka and Jones 2012). This conscious choice is informed by the work of the Systemic Functional Linguistics scholars of the Sydney School who define genre as a “staged goal-oriented process” (Rose and Martin 2012, 1).

4. Findings and discussion

4.4. The exosystem

I became concerned about VK’s potential science education and began to look online for programs local schools were using. The local Catholic school was the only one that presented on their website a clear and well-articulated curriculum with publishers of their central texts listed. The first grade curriculum used by the religious school costs approximately $90 for the central text and workbook. This hardbound American textbook weighs approximately 1400 milligrams (3.25 pounds; Science 2010). In a moment, I will compare this with the texts that the Russian teachers chose from the curricular samples I purchased.

In the Russian Federation, the Ministry of Education in consultation with educators throughout the country sets the standards and then authors/publishers must submit a potential textbook to the Ministry if they seek official recognition as having alignment with the curricular standards of the discipline. The lists for different grade levels and content areas are available online. After an initial review of the Russian Federation standards and approved textbooks with my partner, we established a protocol for the selection of materials and were able to purchase samples of Russian texts for grades K-8 with the $600.

4.4.1. A protocol for selecting texts for a world language

All of the content areas that Skoole teaches align with the educational standards for Russia. The aligned textbooks in publication were headed by grade with subheadings of the content areas. Within the Russian language and literature sections, there was a further subheading of “schools with native and non-native speakers.” We then located two distributors that shipped books to the USA. For a summary of this protocol, see Figure 2.

Figure 2.

Protocol for selecting instructional materials from abroad

Rather than purchase a mix and match set for a sequence of grades (i.e. K-4), we chose to purchase a single series from a single author to provide control of approaches and language choices (LaPolla 2013). The Russian equivalent of Amazon.com, known as OZON.ru, provides information on the popularity of texts through number of purchases and the reviews of both teachers and parents; these indicators were referenced. From grades K-4, the curriculum easily overlapped but the task became more difficult at the 5th grade when the Russian Federation schools begin to focus on the various disciplines of science, while Skoole is still using an integrated social studies and science.

The Russian educational establishment has developed integrated social studies and science curriculums, and rising to the top of the popularity list is the set called The World Around Us (Pleshakov 2013). The distributor listed the set in a newer 2014 edition, but the 2013 edition was still available at a much lower cost. With only a year between the publication of the two editions, and no reissue of the supplementary materials, a small change in the knowledge base could be easily counterbalanced by a teacher. For a glimpse into the sciences beyond the 4th grade in Russia, we bought samples of Earth Science (5th grade), Biology (5th, 6th, and 8th grades), Wild Life Biology (7th grade), Physics (7th and 8th grade), and Chemistry (8th grade). The school will be serving students through 8th grade by the fall of 2015.

Russian language and literature books were purchased for all grades with the exception of kindergarten. The primer that the kindergarten teacher had carried in a suitcase was reviewed online by teachers and parents as the best text to teach children to read. The subheading of “schools with native and non-native speakers” stops after 4th grade on the approval list; therefore, while purchases remained within this section for grades 1–4, we did not have it as a guide for grades 5–8 and relied instead on online reviews.

4.4.2. The Russian teachers review the samples

The books arrived and I quickly performed a cross curricular comparison of lesson objectives and outcomes between the Russian text and Skoole unit overview with the single lesson that I had been provided on Geography. The Skoole unit has eight objectives, and the Russian text has nine starting with Scholars will learn …. This positioning of respect for the learner can be contrasted to the Skoole objectives that begin with Students can …. While Russians view the child as an emerging scholar, Americans tend to position the child as the dichotomous other to a teacher. Seven of the Skoole objectives had equivalent objectives in the Russian textbook curriculum. One Skoole objective, without a Russian equivalent, lacked an evidence output/outcome, thus making it nonexistent. This oversight in the Skoole curriculum could be compensated for with the Russian textbook that has a culturally specific outcome. The Russian objective is stated as “Scholars will learn to find the Russian Federation and Moscow on a map” (Pleshakov 2013, 69). Once the students have indicated on a map this nation and its capital, the teacher could have the students locate the USA and its capital, and then move on to the state and its capital. The learners could continue to work down through the levels of governance and then measure the Skoole outcome to “Identify local boundaries in the community” perhaps by making their own maps.

The Skoole curricular unit called “The World at Hand” consists of six weeks of lessons in this order: (1) Maps as tools, (2) Globe and the world, (3) Geography of the USA, (4) Geography of the Americas, (5) Geography of South America, and (6) Ecology. I expressed my concern to the Russian teachers about the heavy focus on the Western Hemisphere. The Russian perspective represented in the textbook was broader and more inclusive of all inhabited continents. Additionally, the ecology portion of the Russian curriculum is in a supplementary text called Giant in the Field, or First Lessons in Ecological Ethics (Pleshakov 2014), and filled with pencil and color sketches of plants and animals sometimes in combination with photography. The Russian science emphasizes the responsibility of humans to care for the natural environment. This approach to nature is extremely different from the American science book for first grade that has no mention of ecological ethics, and ends with lessons on “How do farmers use technology to grow food?” and “How do builders get wood for a house?” (Science 2010). These lessons from the final unit called “Science in Our World” illustrate environmental studies scholar David Orr’s concern that “education can equip people merely to be more effective vandals of the earth” (1994, 6). In fact, although there are over 30 authors and consultants on the American science textbook series, none of them are teachers or professors of environmental or ecological sciences, nor are there writers or consultants from any environmental and sustainability organizations. The Russian curricular materials foster a love of the natural world that is more conducive to environmental problems of the twenty-first century, and the resource management objective that remains unmeasured in the Skoole curriculum.

Another weakness of the Skoole curriculum is its lack of alignment to written genres within the unit and to the valued academic genres identified by the Sydney School (Rose and Martin 2012). For example, in the lesson “Maps as tools” the children read a narrative about a mouse but, as homework, are asked to “look for” where the sun rises and sets. No direction is given in the lesson on how to make an observational chart or report. Within the same lesson, the learners are expected to “Describe multi-step processes or procedures” but they are not expected to write it. Writing is limited to labeling the classroom and a map. The Russian text offers, within the 2nd grade geography unit, model texts for a simple procedural, how to use a compass, and both compositional and classifying reports. The Skoole unit of instruction has a mix of academic genres and no expectation for production of any of them. The read-aloud focuses on a narrative. The more challenging genres the Russian texts present could be modeled in a detailed reading when a teacher guides students through the meanings and language choices in a shared text (Derewianka and Jones 2012). The genre pedagogy of the Sydney School, underlying the above analysis, has been shown to be effective for supporting students to higher levels of writing and learning in a variety of linguistically diverse settings (Gebhard and Accurso 2014).

The Russian teachers examined the materials over a six-week period and decided The World Around Us was appropriate to their needs. They requested samples of another language and literature series and eventually the teachers selected it. The Russian texts are remarkably conscious of their audience. The World Around Us is colorful with lightweight pages and the full year’s curriculum is broken into two semesters. In this way, a child studying from a Russian book will need to only carry 200 milligrams of weight (.0004 pounds). The American science textbook that I purchased in a moment of anxiety has heavyweight, glossy, ink-saturated paper with much wasted space on pages; it would require a child to tote around an object weighing seven times that of the Russian text. American publishers obviously view the adults who work in schools as their market audience rather than the children obligated to attend. Additionally, while one American book costs just under $100, the Russian texts (for the two semesters) cost only $10 in 2013.

5. Conclusions

The distinct levels of society that surround a dyad in Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory allows me to better tease apart the “the semiotic system that constitutes culture” (Halliday 2007). In this case, the ecological context impeded – more than supported – the instructional need for appropriate materials in a language school. The US macrosystem penetrates all levels of the society, and our weaknesses in translation and in multilingual education are evident in Skoole. These cultural weaknesses impede academic leadership by allowing unqualified and monetarily ambitious people to administer the schools (exosystem). The leaders of Skoole refused, and even threatened with program closure, the Russian teachers who lost time for preparing the integrated language and content lesson plans necessary for a quality teaching performance (Berg and Huang 2015), because they were forced to translate American materials that were given to them (mesosystem). This lack of cooperation from the leadership further impeded VKs initial desire to engage with the reading of a language due to a lack of colorful Russian textbooks at the dual language school (microsystem). However, at the time of this writing, the Russian teachers at Skoole have textbooks.

The expectation that non-English teachers translate and teach American materials using techniques that a corporation deems appropriate is less ignorance than ideological imperialism. The leadership had no interest in the unique pedagogical histories of Russia, China, and the Spanish-speaking world. No attempt was ever made by the CEO, corporate board, or Skoole administration to understand the importance of quality books to the Russian culture, or the pedagogical traditions of the various cultures represented in the school. The leadership failed to begin intercultural conversations to foster appreciation and insights about employees and families, although “cross-cultural understanding” is written in the corporate mission statement.

Much of the dual language research in North America education emerged from the Canadian context at the latter end of the twentieth century. The USA presents different obstacles to educate for multilingualism. Since the Bush administration’s push for No Child Left Behind legislation, the funding for public education in the USA has been diverted to questionable charter school organizations, and English medium testing regimes – the two core elements of the later reform movement. This social trend adversely influences language development even as families seek opportunities to learn languages other than English. Language scholars have argued about appropriate instructional materials (Genesse 1994; Lyster 1987, 2007), but most teachers will agree that it is easier to teach with materials than without materials, particularly when the task is reading and writing. Downloading or creating access to online materials requires much time to search for, locate, evaluate, select, and reproduce the items appropriate for a lesson’s objectives and outcomes. A base text that can be augmented, critiqued, and supported by a qualified teaching professional is far better than starting from scratch. One advantage to including texts purchased abroad is they push teachers and students to consider a discipline from another society’s perspective. For example, the science for the young children of the Russian language requires them to think of the natural environment with “ethics”; this demand is not made of students reading American texts. The focus on resource usage in the American context is likely a result of the historically capitalistic ideology.

This study is situated in a single charter school under a corporate management structure, and thus, does not apply to the majority of the US public schools. News outlets frequently report on charter school founders and managers embezzling money intended to educate the youth (Center for Media and Democracy 2015; Ravitch 2013). The accounting practices of the corporation controlling Skoole were brought into question by parents and investigated by federal authorities though that information lies beyond the scope of this study. There is a lack of scholarship on how immigrant, nonimmigrant, and mixed communities act and react under the unethical and exploitive practices of school leadership, both elected and appointed. I could find no research on the impact to children’s language and health when a community is challenged by a forced closure. More research needs to address language development across the ecological environment to examine local priorities filtered through national (and global) context.

As a parent, I was concerned about the immediate well-being of my child and the microsystem impacting her development. M.A.K. Halliday suggests that language development is learning language, learning through language, and learning about language. The lack of books in the Russian classrooms, once brought to my attention by Carla, became a great concern to my partner and me; because, the Russian sense of kultura (culture/education) is rooted in an appreciation for excellence in writing and classical literature. The choice of enduring an environment with little taxpayer and state oversight would be a waste of time if my daughter were only learning through poorly written Russian translations. The anger and confusion about the lack of Russian materials for our children which led to the parents’ collective action is a small example of resistance to the reformist’s monetarily punitive agenda that has dominated the discourse on education in the US society for over four decades.

The protocol presented in this research is intended to assist those people who are dedicated to advocacy for families that want a heritage bilingual education while they adapt to a different country and culture. I also hope that the story of our struggle for appropriate educational materials for our Russian-speaking children in the USA will inspire you to continue your efforts regardless of resistance in the ecological system.