From Innovation to Independence

Abstract

The movements for change in Russian schooling continued. It was not always clear exactly how the various groups and individuals operated and overlapped. Teacher innovators such as V.F. Shatalov, Shalva Amonashvili, and Sophia Nikolaevna Lysenkova, appeared to continue to work in their own particular style, opting for a freer and more democratic form of teaching within the general system of education. Lysenkova, whom I met in April 1990, had just returned from a meeting in Bukhara, attended by many of the same people as the original gathering in Peredelkino in October 1986, when the pedagogy of cooperation was proclaimed. At the seminar of the Commune groups held in Zvenigorod in April 1990, there were representatives from AmonashviU’s school in Tbilisi, from the Eureka Clubs and from the Creative Union of Teachers. The aims of the various groups were largely synonymous and there was certainly much overlapping in their activities.