Feminist Autoethnography of Language Education and Childhood on Slavic Soil and Stateside

This volume replicates and offers a fresh reconceptualization of the 1970 comparative education book Two Worlds of Childhood, U.S. and U.S.S.R. researched and written by Urie Bronfenbrenner who later drew on the experiences to propose a comprehensive framework of human development: Bronfenbrenner's Ecological System Theory (BEST), published in 1979. BEST situates the human at the center of four "systems" of a social environment where the highest level of culture (or "macro-system") affects all lower levels down to the individual person, but where the lower levels can also influence higher levels. This interplay between culture and a person lies at the heart of autoethnography, and in this volume, the author, an English teacher of thirty years applies this framework to her experience preparing future teachers of the English language in a Northwestern Russian university. As the seasons change, she reflects upon her six years of teaching on Slavic soil and her eight-year-old daughter's transition to a Russian public school after three years of learning in a dual language English/Russian school in the US. The text provides observations of elementary, secondary, and college level classrooms and translations of poems found in the elementary Russian language and literature program. Exploring the vulnerability of educating a child in a foreign context through the perspective of a mother-scholar, it will appeal to scholars and researchers with interests in comparative and international education, literacy education, and autoethnography.