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Abstract: Analysis of fieldwork conducted in St Petersburg suggests that high pupil motivation may
be in part attributable to a ‘pedagogical nexus’ - a set of linked, interactive and mutually-reinforcing
influences on pupils’ motivation to learn within and because of the schooling process. Elements of
the nexus are outlined. The role in research of identifying a nexus is considered. Differences
between explanation, correlation and causation are drawn out. Error in taking elements of
explanation to be causative factors is considered. The nature of the kinds of implication that a
Russian nexus could have is discussed with reference to English compulsory education.
Method: The main mode of inquiry for this paper was audio-taped, semi-structured
interview. Unstructured classroom observation was also conducted in each school.
Data was not considered plausible unless it was repeatedly confirmed from many
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sources and not disconfirmed by any. Data was also checked for compatibility with
our (1999) survey of 1324 15-year old pupils’ responses to a questionnaire and
reports of comparable studies in the literature, including: Bereday, et al. (1960),
Grant (1972), Dunstan (1978, 1992), Shturman (1988), Muckle (1988, 1990), Ispa
(1994), Holmes, et al. (1995), Schweisfurth (1996, 1998) and Webber (1997).
Sources of evidence: 40 15-year old pupils, representing a range from high to low
attainers, were interviewed for 45-60 minutes, 10 in each of 4 St Petersburg schools,
chosen to represent the range of variation in neighbourhoods. Questions explored:
deployment of time; volume of, value set upon and parental interest in homework;
leisure; attitudes to discipline and learning in class; attributions for success and
failure; value set upon grades; value set upon education; career and future
aspirations. 50 teachers were interviewed for 50-60 minutes, 10 in each of 5
schools, 4 of which were the same as used for pupil interviews. Selected teachers
taught the beginning (7+) and end (10+) of the primary phase or were subject
teachers of 15-year olds for Russian (including Literature) Maths, Science and one
of History/Geography and Music/Art plus two other subjects. Teacher interviews
covered the same areas as pupils but also contained questions about teachers’
tasks and role and the impact of recent change. 3 Directors of Schools, 18 teacher-
trainees (in groups of 3), a group of 8 teacher educators and 2 senior staff in the
University of Pedagogical Mastery were also interviewed about recent change and
relations between law, rhetoric and practice. Elucidation of specific questions and
clarification of contexts was sought opportunistically with other knowledgeable
informants.
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Continuity of school, class and teacher which fosters: a fluent age-phase transition,
between lower- and higher-grade styles and expectations; a highly individual-
teacher-specific audit of accountability; high pupil dependency on teachers
reinforcing compliance with expectations; a degree of solidarity between teacher and
class in meeting external curricular demands; and, a class peer-culture, pervaded by
a sense of inclusiveness, solidarity and mutuality, which took for granted that
learning was the purpose of schooling and that this would involve work.
Readiness and preparation for schooling: Starting aged seven, most children are
amply ready for the disciplines of schooling. Teachers report that almost all learn to
read well enough to manage other curriculum demands by the end of their first term.
A third to a half have attended kindergarten from 3+, though the number is falling as
the state withdraws funding. Kindergartens develop personal independence and
prepare socially, aesthetically, emotionally, morally and in oracy for formal schooling.
The main method is teacher-led group play. As children approach school age, this is
increasingly interspersed with two or three twenty-minute periods a day of more
formal learning, involving individual answering up and calling for close attention and
concentration. The early and rapid acquisition of adequate literacy minimises
demotivation, both to reading, itself, and to wider curriculum participation.
Curriculum, pedagogics and texts: The national curriculum of general education has
evolved since 1932, with a largely stable emphasis on finding effective methods for
teaching most subjects in the all-ability, neighbourhood comprehensive school.
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Collaboration between teacher- innovators and university pedagogy specialists has
led to the development of a critical pedagogical expertise, importantly expressed in
the writing of school text-books which articulate the curriculum into a series of lesson
topics and homework exercises for a year’s work. Teachers’ pre-service training also
centres on the textbooks, deepening personal understanding of topics, explaining
pedagogical reasons for their selection, framing and formulation, and considering
their teaching in practice.
Lesson styles: 5 or 6 lessons a day, occupy the first 45-50 minutes of an hour, the
last 10-15 minutes being a break. Lessons are highly disciplined and intensive.
Except when asked to write or speak, pupils pay attention. If asked to speak, they
do so with poise, in well-formed sentences, showing discomfort, if not able to
perform satisfactorily. Breaks are rowdy, but barely supervised. There are intimate
links between textbook, lesson, homework and assessment. Textbooks serve as
resource packs. Homeworks relate closely to the particular lesson which they
precede, or follow. Much assessment is oral. Individual pupils are called upon
throughout the lesson and the teacher’s estimate of their success may be entered in
a daily record which parents see. A 45-minute lesson can contain between five and
ten changes of activity – all teacher-led, or directed. Lessons include a mix of
listening, to the teacher, or fellow pupils, brief silent reading, focused reflective
thinking, and brief interludes of writing. Teachers also introduce ‘relaxation pauses’.
Lessons also have a deeper three-part structure: rehearsal of previous learning,
particularly from the immediately foregoing homework; introduction of new material;
rehearsal of new material and relation to previous learning and guidance on
appropriate homework to consolidate new learning.
Assessment styles: Any pupil may be called on at random in a lesson and the
requirement for a full and clear answer, together with the use of the daily record,
place a high premium on doing homework thoroughly and following lessons closely.
Curriculum structure, pitch and pace: although learning is very much lesson by
prescribed lesson, continuity of contact makes it possible for teacher and class to
reanimate shared experience of prior learning, and connect it with new, so that key
ideas can be retaught, many times, in new contexts, or with new extensions. Oral
review in class reinforces the habit of organising developing understanding for ready
presentation. Pupils have frequent opportunities to draw on whole-class feedback to
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improve initially imperfect understanding so that, although apparently linear, the
curriculum may operate rather as a kind of Brunerian ‘spiral’. Since all-ability pupils
share lessons cheerfully, the curriculum must be pitched and paced to make an
accessible demand, despite the fact that studies of the Russian curriculum suggest
that it may be rather more ‘difficult’ than the English National Curriculum.
On current evidence (May 1999) despite wider political, social and economic turmoil,
Russian schools have served as enclaves for the preservation of a ‘pedagogical
nexus’ which has so far maintained high pupil motivation, through a transition from a
focus on state service, to a concern for personal survival and individual economic
viability.
progress is most likely where it involves the successive correction and extension of
initial and then ongoing attempts at a complete explanatory model. Although this
complete models, even if initially rather unrigorously, than to test hypotheses which
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models,1 or of general theoretical models which pre-specify what will count as
evidence,2 rather than seek to explain ‘local’ states of affairs. If the general
and implication must first be identified. In these terms, the nexus represents a set of
experience, it is important to note that the elements of the nexus are explanatory
this does not make motivation an ‘effect’, nor other features ‘causes’ . Rather
motivation correlates with other features, which are themselves complex, subsuming
research interests. Any outcome of interest to us is, in effect, an aspect of the state-
rather the case that change creates a new state-of-affairs which may, or may not
exhibit our desired new aspect, and also other unanticipated and variously desirable
aspects
1. How well articulated is the current relationship between the curriculum and
topics, ideas and activities? At present, we have little machinery for expert
of textbooks.
2. There is pressure for more ‘whole-class interactive teaching’ and for a larger
homework?
4. Is the existing assessment system well framed to preserve the motivation of those
Unlike the Russian system, where a pupil can be daily rewarded, to some
system constantly implies as fully worthwhile only that which a few are
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5. Is whole class interactive teaching compatible with differentiation of learning
tasks, as, for example, advocated in the National Literacy and Numeracy
exotic and difficult to assimilate. Reynolds and Farrell (1996) argued that the
countries, where all children in a class are expected to take part in lessons
teaching and communality of learning task have not been fully recognised in
age-phase transition.
7. Would a later start to formal learning prove a significant factor in both early and
continuing success and motivation? Should we not earnestly research the
experience of those countries, of which Russia is merely one, which start formal
schooling at six, or seven, and also the form and function of their pre-school
preparation?
REFERENCES
BEREDAY, George Z. F., BRICKMAN, William W. & READ, Gerald H. (eds) (1960) The Changing
Soviet School. London: Constable & Co..
BIGGS, J. (1994). What are effective schools? Lessons from East and West. Australian Educational
Researcher, 21(1), pp. 19-39.
DUNSTAN, John (1978) Paths to Excellence and the Soviet School. (N.F.E.R.)
DUNSTAN, John (Ed.) (1992) Soviet Education under Perestroika. (London, Routledge).
ELLIOTT, Julian, HUFTON, Neil, HILDRETH, Anthony & ILLUSHIN, Leonid (1999) Factors influencing
educational motivation: a study of attitudes, expectations and behaviour of children in
Sunderland, Kentucky and St Petersburg. British Educational Research Journal, 25(1), 75-94.
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GOW, Lyn, BALLA, John, KEMBER, David & TAI HAU, Kit (1995). The learning approaches of
Chinese people: a function of socialisation processes and the context of learning? In M.
BOND (Ed.), Handbook of Chinese Psychology, pp. 109-125. (Hong Kong, Oxford University
Press).
GRANT, Nigel (1972) Soviet Education. 3rd edn. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
HOLMES, B., READ, G.H. & VOSKRESENSKAYA, N. (1995) Russian Education: tradition and
transition. London: Garland.
ISPA, Jean (1994) Child Care in Russia - in transition. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey.
KEMBER, David (1996). The intention to both memorise and understand: another approach to
learning? Higher Education, 31, pp. 341-354.
MARTON, Ference, WATKINS, David & TANG, Catherine (1997) ‘Discontinuities and continuities in
the experience of learning: an interview study of high-school students in Hong Kong’,
Learning and Instruction, 7(1), pp. 21-48.
MUCKLE, James, Y. (1988) A guide to the Soviet curriculum : what the Soviet child is taught in
school. London/ New York: Croom Helm
MUCKLE, James, Y. (1990) Portrait of a Soviet School under Glasnost. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
REYNOLDS, D. & FARRELL, S. (1996) Worlds Apart? A Review of International Surveys of
Educational Achievement Involving England. London, H.M.S.O..
SCHWEISFURTH, Michele (1996) Portrait of a Russian School: School 143, Perm. Unpublished
paper. Warwick: University of Warwick Institute of Education.
SCHWEISFURTH, Michele (1998) Report on Visit to Perm: 2 - 24 April, 1998. Unpublished paper.
Warwick: University of Warwick Institute of Education.
SHTURMAN, Dora (1988) The Soviet Secondary School. Trans. Philippa Shimrat. London:
Routledge.
WEBBER, Stephen Lawrence (1997) All Change? School Reform and Society in Russia, 1991-1996.
Unpublished PhD. thesis, Exeter: University of Exeter. British Library No. DX196630.
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Contact:
Neil Hufton, Julian Elliott
School of Education, University of Sunderland, Hammerton Hall, Gray Road,
Sunderland, SR2 8JB, United Kingdom.
Tel: +44 (0) 191 515 2395
Fax: +44 (0) 191 515 2629
Email: <neil.hufton@sunderland.ac.uk> and joe.elliott@sunderland.ac.uk
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1
In the early stages of researching in an unfamiliar culture, one can only make any kind of sense of what one is seeing and
hearing by assimilating it to prior understandings developed in one’s familiar context. One effect of conducting qualitative
research in an unfamiliar culture is to raise one’s awareness of gaps and inconsistencies in the ‘domestic’ understanding
which one brings to the task. If one is not to flounder in a morass of one-to-one mismatches, it quickly becomes clear that
gaining an understanding of social interaction in the terms of the unfamiliar culture is a necessary preliminary for any
kind of valid comparison.
2
For example, a number of authors in Schwalb & Schwalb (1996) illustrate the inappropriateness of unreflectively
applying North American psychological and psychiatric concepts and ideas to researching Japanese child rearing. See
especially Vogel (1996, 177-200).