The Experimental Stations and Psychoanalytic Laboratory, Soviet Russia

Soon after the Revolution of 1917 in Russia, Stanislav Shatsky (1878–1934), one of the founders of a settlement for working-class children in Moscow in 1905, who had played a leading role in the propaganda of progressive education in prerevolutionary Russia, promptly set about reestablishing his progressive endeavour, promoting his view on education reform among Soviet bureaucrats and teachers and garnering support for an innovative idea: a network of laboratory schools, named experimental stations, devoted exclusively to experimental work. Applying a documentary method, this chapter identifies and evaluates some of the themes and forms of discourse that surrounded the use of research into child development within in-service teacher training in two laboratory schools, drawing on a range of material including trainers’ notes and trainees’ reflective diaries, commentaries in books and journals, and children’s drawings and recorded learning logs.