Nataliya Ivanovna Churkina,
Doctor of Pedagogical Sciences, Associate Professor, Omsk State Pedagogical University, Omsk, Russia, e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
“Thaw” in the School Culture: Parent Meetings in Soviet Cinema of 1960s
DOI: 10.31518/2618-9100-2022-5-15
The paper analyzes the school culture of the Soviet school based on the representations of three films about the school. It is substantiated that the concept of “school culture” has been developed in science since the end of the 20th century. Within the framework of the concept of organizational culture (M.M. Potashnik, A.M. Moiseev, K.M. Ushakov and others), considering it in the context of improving the efficiency of managing a school organization. The article tested a different optics of research: to consider school culture as a specific type of culture, applying in it all those characteristics and approaches that have been developed by cultural researchers. The work proves that the culture of a community is best known through the daily practices of its members. Teachers and parents are described as subjects of the school community that form the school culture. The analysis of the daily practices of parent meetings presented in the article, represented in Soviet cinema of 1960s, allows us to speak about the liberalization of school culture, which began during the “Thaw”. It is concluded that liberalization trends include changes in the material and spiritual components of school culture, which manifested itself in the transformation of the appearance of teachers and parents, as a result of which the boundaries of the acceptable norm become more flexible. In the spiritual component of school culture, examples also began to appear of a departure from the teacher’s monologue, instructions and censures to dialogue and even discussion. The adult community begins to recognize the right to individuality for the student (especially talented), his right to express his own position, including in relation to the parental model of behavior and upbringing. All this stimulates the process of registration of the parent community. School cinema captures individual moments when parents begin to share common goals, new values sprout (recognition of individuality, respect for the child, his rights).
Publishing: 28/10/2022
The article has been received by the editor on 03/06/2022
How to cite: Churkina N.I. “Thaw” in the School Culture: Parent Meetings in Soviet Cinema of 1960s // Historical Courier, 2022, No. 5 (25), pp. 181–192. [Available online: http://istkurier.ru/data/2022/ISTKURIER-2022-5-15.pdf]
Links: Issue 5 2022
Keywords: school culture; Soviet school; school cinema; parent community; organizational culture