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As a result of radically lower enrollments, high school and university
programs (graduate as well as undergraduate) have suffered everything from
staff cuts to mergers to complete elimination. Applications for in-country
programs have fallen also, and the blow has been compounded by the
proliferation of programs of all sorts that have sprung up with the opening up of
the Russian economy.
As we head into the twenty-first century, the Russian teaching profession
is facing a totally altered landscape from the one in which virtually all of its
practitioners were trained. We are faced head on with the political and
economic revolution that has attended the opening up of Russia. Where
government support insulated many Russian language programs in the US
from the realities of the marketplace, there is now much less support for
programs that cannot support themselves directly from enrollments. Where
teachers and departments could structure their programs in ways that reflected
only the historical development of the field, there is now less room for programs
that cannot demonstrate direct applicability of their "product" (i.e., the
marketable skills of their graduates). Where relatively stable and reasonably
high numbers of students (compared to other LCTLs) allowed the field to be
rather profligate in its demands on students as they moved from one institution
to another, our reduced resources demand that we make better use of our
resources--both faculty and student time.
Our new reality has numerous implications for the ways in which we carry
on the business of teaching. The various missions that foreign language
programs can choose to address was discussed above, so without going into
specifics again here, it should be clear that the profession is faced with many
changes and challenges that we ignore only at our peril. We face challenges
not only in the marketplace that we prepare our students to enter--and we
delude ourselves if we fail to see that even traditional liberal arts students face a
marketplace--but also in the way in which we deploy our field's resources.
As if the supply-and-demand changes accompanying the political and
economic revolution weren't enough for the profession to cope with, there are
two concomitant revolutions going on. One of these, the technology revolution,
has been very much in evidence for the last decade. Computers and
telecommunication have the potential to require us to thoroughly reconceptual-
ize and restructure our notions of teaching and learning. Distance learning,
long somewhat at the fringe of our ideas about teaching, has the potential to
become a crucial tool for the teaching of all LCTLs. Notions about teaching as
performance, and the roles in "learning" and "reinforcement" in the classroom
versus at home may be stood on their heads. The remoteness of the Soviet
Union may melt as the Internet makes possible all kinds of interactions with
Russians, in Russia and elsewhere.
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