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Patriotism, History Teaching, and History Textbooks in Russia: What Was Old Is New Again

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Globalisation, Ideology and Politics of Education Reforms

Part of the book series: Globalisation, Comparative Education and Policy Research ((GCEP,volume 14))

Abstract

This chapter examined the extent to which government-endorsed, patriotic curriculum is being effectuated throughout the Russian Federation, particularly through the promotion of new, grand narrative-style high school history textbooks. Authors performed a comparative content analysis of different textbook accounts (n = 5) of three different events/eras from twentieth century Russian history: (1) Russia’s participation in World War II; (2) post-WWII Russia; and (3) the attempt to establish democracy in Czechoslovakia in 1968. Textbooks were selected as representative of various eras in Russia’s recent history and were analyzed to determine the degrees and extents to which each one presented the selected events. Authors connected the presentation of each event to the time in which the text was published and predominant concepts of patriotism and national identity of the day as a means to investigate how the language of text has changed over the past 30 years. The study, which was conducted during a time of prominent military activity in Russia, revealed that Russian history is increasingly being taught from a single grand narrative approach, and high school history textbooks appear to be incorporating more patriotic and nationalistic themes just as they did during Soviet times. Researchers determined this trend warrants increased concerns among history and education scholars that Russian history/social studies education is shifting backward by promoting the hyper-nationalist ideas of the Cold War rather than the concepts of global democratic citizenship promoted during the 1990s.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Russian-American Education Forum, Seattle Pacific University, Seattle, WA, USA

    Tatyana Tsyrlina-Spady

  2. University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Michael Lovorn

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  1. Tatyana Tsyrlina-Spady
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  2. Michael Lovorn
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Correspondence to Tatyana Tsyrlina-Spady .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Education and Arts, School of Education, Australian Catholic University, East Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

    Joseph Zajda

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Tsyrlina-Spady, T., Lovorn, M. (2015). Patriotism, History Teaching, and History Textbooks in Russia: What Was Old Is New Again. In: Zajda, J. (eds) Globalisation, Ideology and Politics of Education Reforms. Globalisation, Comparative Education and Policy Research, vol 14. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19506-3_4

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