The 2019 Global Russia Group 2019 Blog
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Welcome to the Carleton LANGUAGE AND CULTURE IN GLOBAL RUSSIA
On the Global Russia program students devote half of their credit load to the study of the Russian language: grammar, pronounciation and intonation, and conversation practice. Each of the language courses brings with it, of course, cultural knowledge: not just where to say something or how to enunciate it, but what one’s interlocutor understands (or won’t understand).
The other half of the credit load is devoted to the study of the cultures of the Russian Federation in historical context and with attention to the multiplicities that constitute Russia’s heritage as a nation. To this end students explore areas of Moscow beyond the university, travel to cities that cradled Russia’s multi-ethnic civilizations (as well as repressed them), and towards the end of their language studies cross five time zones and spend two weeks exploring the heritage of the Lake Baikal region.
Over the past twenty-five years of the program’s existence we have built enduring relationships with teachers at Moscow State University, with guides in Vladimir and Suzdal, with teachers and students in Murom, with our favorite guide in St. Petersburg, and with an entire cluster of friends in the Lake Baikal region who provide us with housing, transportation, and insights into their ways of life that in any other context would remain merely something to watch out the window.
Which brings me to this blog: students on the Global Russia program experience more than can be summarized in a blog, but by the same token writing helps us remember what we experience and to reflect on those experiences. Blog-writing is too often taken for granted. The ability to convey in a blog post some part of an experience, however, requires skills and practice. For this reason, students on the Global Russia program are asked to set some of their experiences to writing in blogs, to acquire practice in this genre of writing as well as to expand basic skills working online. To facilitate their progress and to provide a degree of orientation (as opposed to order) students are assigned topics linked to their course readings on which to create their blogs. Those topics can be found at the top of each menu. Within each menu you will find links to student blogs on that topic. You can also use the links on right to access one student’s blog as well as to view the entire archive of blogs.
In their blogs students are encouraged to relate their own experiences and to link those experiences to readings for their course work. They are discouraged from drawing broad generalizations that cannot be supported by experience or the scholarship of others. If you find anything in this blog worthy of comment (or questionable) you are encouraged to leave your comments.
Diane Nemec Ignashev
2019 Global Russia Program Director