1: Why Ethnographic Writing Attracts Teachers and Students

This chapter considers how ethnographic inquiry—the study of people and their development—has been taken up in different historical periods in Kazakhstan. During the Soviet era, the study of human development was abandoned as a topic of academic focus, and even today the educational system in Kazakhstan still remains under the influence of that decision of the Soviet government. Though studies of certain scholars before 1936 proposed solid foundations for community inquiry, the foundations did not bring changes to the educational system across Kazakhstan even after its independence in 1991. However, the Reading & Writing for Critical Thinking (RWCT) program introduced changes to education. RWCT met the professional needs of post-Soviet countries’ educators and helped teachers involved (about 5% of all educators in Kazakhstan) to give academic attention to everyday life through ethnographic research of local communities and to step in to the prohibited zone of child and human development study.