The purpose of the study was to uncover the cultural beliefs and values that underlie American and Russian teachers’ representations of their professional identities and their understanding of power in education in the context of globally disseminated education reforms and current educational mandates— the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) in America and the Unified State Exam of 2001 (USE) in Russia —through examining discourses that manifested themselves in their talk. Critical discourse analysis (CDA) was used both as a strategy of inquiry and a theoretical framework for analysis and interpretation of data.
Primary sources of data were semi-structured informal interviews of 11 American teachers from a Midwestern state in the United States and 11 Russian teachers from a Mid-Volga region Republic in Russia. Observations of teacher lessons were included in the study to see what discourses manifested themselves in their actual behavior in reality of classrooms. In addition, for the purpose of checking “analysis with a different group” (Wood & Kroger, 2000, p. 79), three American and three Russian administrators, as well as three Russian teachers and three American Peace Corps volunteers who had been exposed to both systems of education were interviewed.
The findings revealed that teachers employed a number of discourses generated in relation to the Bright Future, Communism Discourse model, in the Russian case, and a number of discourses generated in relation to the American Dream Discourse model, in the American case, to (re)construct, contest, and negotiate their teacher identities in the context of educational reforms.