Session Information
17 SES 05, Parallel Paper Session
Parallel Paper Session
Contribution
This paper looks at the implementation of some of the dominant ideas about aesthetic experience and transformation in Soviet Russia in the context of the education of orphans in particular. Jewish education in pre-revolutionary Russia was predominantly religious, and the arts were not included in the curricula. Jewish children often received their education at segregated religious private schools, located within synagogues. The leading pre-revolutionary reform movements in the Jewish community, such as Haskalah, Diaspora Nationalism, Bund Socialism, Zionism, and Bolshevism, emphasised the importance of modern arts education to the young Jews who lived beyond the Pale of Settlement. Professional art organisations were established by the Jewish community, around the same time, with a major goal to create a system of Jewish art education. After the abdication of the Romanovs in March 1917, the provisional government abolished all restrictions based on religion or nationality, and brought about a significant transformation in the education of the Jews in Russia. The new Bolshevik government that came to power in October 1917 sought to unify all schools through labour education, communist morality, and aesthetic experience. Many school-communes were opened to accommodate the growing number of orphaned and abandoned children during the Civil War. This paper seeks to identify how the party doctrine was associated with Jewish and the progressives’ ideas about arts education in the school-communes and analyses the writing of Leon Trotsky about aesthetics and transformation, Lev Vygotsky’s theory of aesthetic experiencing, and John Dewey’s work on aesthetics. The assumption of this paper is that something can be learned about the way political and cultural influences transform education by a systematic exploration of their common epistemological ground (Vesely, 2004), achieved over the course of conceptual interaction. Overall, this study intends to contribute the understanding of the policy construction process in Soviet education.
The theoretical approach underpinning this study is informed by an understanding of the relationship between mediation culture and agency, as interpreted by Harry Daniels (2006). In order to examine how the cultural dynamics and the dominant political system jointly determined the practice of arts in the commune, this paper adopts a concept, which integrates cultural-historical theory with Dalibor Vesely’s assumption of the nature of the search for a common epistemological ground (Vesely, 2004).
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Partlett, W. (2006). Bourgeois Ideas in Communist Construction: The Development of Stanislav Shatskii's Teacher Training Methods. History of Education, 35 (4), 453-474. Litvak, O. (2003). Review Essay. You Can Take the Historian out of the Pale, But Can You Take the Pale out of the Historian? New Trends in the Study of Russian Jewry, AJS Review (1475-4541), 27(2), 301-311. Kirschenbaum, L. A. (2001). Small Comrades: Revolutionizing Childhood in Soviet Russia, 1917-1932. New York: Routledge Falmer. Daniels, H. (2006). The 'Social' in Post-Vygotskian Theory. Theory & Psychology, 16(1), 37 Dewey, J. (1934). Art as experience. New York: Berkeley Publishing Group. Dror, Y. (1999) Progressive Informal Education Interpreted by the Founders of Kibbutz Education in Eretz Israel (Palestine), 1918-1948, Blackwell E-Journal of Education History, Oranim & Haifa University. Available through: http://www.cedu.niu.edu/blackwell/dror01.htm [Accessed 9 June 2011) Vesely, D. (2004) Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation: The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Trotsky, L. (1950). Art and Politics in Our Epoch, Fourth International, 11 (2), 61-64. Vygotsky, L.S. (1974). The Psychology of Art. Cambridge, Mass., and London: MIT Press.
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.