Subjective Innovations: Pedagogical Movement in the Context of Radical Social Change

Abstract

The innovative pedagogical movement that boosted in the second half of the 1980s exhausted its original momentum relatively soon and never became a sustainable factor of institutional development in Russia. In this article, we investigate into the reasons behind the pedagogical movement using interviews with participants and narrative analysis of periodicals and archival materials. By doing so, we justify the point that the goal of promoting subjective emancipation and adopting the culture of freedom dominated the goals of organizational project management. We show that the pedagogical movement was dependent on institutional arrangements engrained in the social order of the late Soviet era. Innovations developed within the framework of a specific situation: individual communities emerging around some authors were capable of establishing the new as a subjective legacy, but they were unable to develop or even retain it in the existing institutionalized arrangements.