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This Master’s thesis examines the period of transition (1928-1935) in Soviet cinema when the avant-garde directors Grigori Kozintsev, Leonid Trauberg, and Oleksandr Dovzhenko, among others, began to make films under the strictures of a new state-mandated socialist realist aesthetic. It argues, despite the prominence of literature which maintains that socialist realism precipitated a conceptual break that effectively ended avant-garde filmmaking practice, that socialist realism simultaneously preserved, developed, and negated elements of the avant-garde cinema. Using Katerina Clark’s The Soviet Novel and Louis Althusser’s “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” this thesis first illustrates the programmatic, narrative, and ideological continuities between the aesthetics in Kozintsev and Trauberg’s The New Babylon (1929), Alone (1931), and The Youth of Maxim (1935). These films exemplify how socialist realism perpetuated the modified bildungsroman plot pre-figured by the avant-garde, further transformed Leninism’s spontaneity/consciousness dialectic which ideologically interpellates individuals via social being, and began to utilise continuity editing in place of montage to construct overtonal ideological impressions. Next it explores continuities of visual stylistics in five films by Oleksandr Dovzhenko, Zvenigora (1928), Arsenal (1929), Earth (1930), Ivan (1932), and Aerograd (1935). Here the concepts of the “transitional film” and the “reduced form of stylistics” are introduced. The claim is made that the films made after the introduction of sound technology and before the official codification of socialist realism in 1934 represent a distinct hybrid of the avant-garde and socialist realist aesthetics and that a particular mediation of avant-garde stylistics through the new strictures was practiced. In the films of Dovzhenko, the continuing employment of three devices is identified to support the concept of the reduced form of stylistics: the use of the monocle (single element) lens, the poeticization of death, and stylised figure movement. In identifying the trajectories of plot structure, ideology, and stylistic devices in the transition from the avant-garde to socialist realism, this thesis elucidates significant continuities between the two aesthetics that embody a conceptual development, or sublation, in place of a conceptual break, or pure negation. / Graduate / 2022-06-09

Student demographic data in today’s elementary and secondary schools have shown an increase in the numbers of diverse students in classrooms across the United States. This change in classroom demographics has established the need for changes to both the classroom educational environment and the preparation of our teachers. Research supports a few documented ways teachers can support both their student experiences and academic performance. Culturally competent teachers, cultural humility, and culturally relevant pedagogy are a few of the ways educators can adapt to the change in student demographics. Linking the literature to these findings will help provide an overview of several factors associated with teacher cultural competency and student academic performance. Included in the research are classroom demographics, cultural bias, teacher education and experience, relational capacity, and culturally relevant pedagogy. The research suggests that the more teachers are aware of their own bias through culturally competent teacher education, the more successful teachers are at reaching diverse students in the classroom. The goal is to provide information on the importance of teacher cultural competency and how it relates to student success. This action research, case study analyzed the relationship between teachers’ cultural competency and their students’ academic performance through a post-positive research study. Data were collected from various resources: classroom observations; teacher, parent, and student focus groups; academic data; and observations of classroom instruction. This study was a 9-week, two-intervention cycle of action research. The purpose of this action research, case study was to gain insight into teacher, student, and parent experiences and perceptions of classrooms where teachers were of Slavic descent and classrooms where teachers were of non-Slavic descent. This action research, case study aimed to answer multiple research questions to investigate why there were discrepancies between classrooms led by Slavic and non-Slavic teachers with regard to the classroom pedagogy and the academic success of Slavic students. Past research has supported a wide array of culturally responsive teaching techniques for a variety of ethnic and linguistic subgroups. The past research did not specifically look at, or study, the Slavic cultural needs in the classroom. This action research, case study specifically looked at the Slavic cultural needs at one particular school. This is the first study to provide information on the importance of culturally responsive teaching for the Slavic community and how teacher cultural humility with Slavic students can potentially improve perceptions, experiences, and academic success. This study can help fill the gap and potentially lead to further inquiry into Slavic cultural humility.

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