Olga Klimova Takes a Holistic Approach to Teaching Russian
Olga Klimova, teaching associate professor and director of the Russian program in the Dietrich School’s Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, uses language as a tool for students to deeply engage with and explore the nuances of a new culture.
“What drives me is the culture,” says Klimova. “The language—grammar, vocabulary, and synta—these are tools for students to be able to engage with the target culture, to understand that culture, to create some kind of empathy for that culture, and also to be able to survive in that country if they end up going there. We want them to travel the world; we want them to become global citizens.”
This idea of a holistic representation of a culture permeates Klimova’s teaching and was motivated by what she perceived as a gap in Russian courses. The older course design presented Russian culture through a very narrow lens, with content largely focused on two Russian cities without much acknowledgment of the greater diaspora.
“Students were leaving with the idea that there are two main cities where people speak Russian: Moscow and Saint Petersburg. I knew that that was not correct, because my background is multicultural,” says Klimova, who was born in Uzbekistan and lived in Belarus.
“I already knew that Russian was used in other cultures and countries, so I thought that it would be inaccurate to only discuss Russia and the Russian Federation in our classrooms. Plus, within the Russian Federation, there are so many different ethnicities, cultural groups, and ethnic republics. Many of them have their own languages; many of them have their unique customs and traditions. … We've been creating, for many decades, this very simple, one-dimensional image, while it is, in fact, much more complex and nuanced, and it needed to be addressed.”
To remedy this lack of representation in the curriculum, Klimova has gone to great lengths to include materials that expose her students to all of the countries that use Russian.
“Our materials may be from Kazakhstan, or Belarus, or Ukraine, or Lithuania … So they were not published by Russian sources in Russia, but by and for their local Russian speakers. I use this opportunity for students to learn about these other cultures, using these authentic materials,” explains Klimova.
Klimova integrated multiple novel teaching approaches to expose her students to different elements of cultures in which Russian is spoken daily, including hosting conversations over Zoom with native Russian speakers living abroad and sharing videos she gathered via social media from different parts of the Russian-speaking world. An internship has also been expanded for students to interact with the greater Pittsburgh community as Russian teaching assistants at Pittsburgh Brashear High School or by volunteering with local agencies and NGOs that work with refugees and immigrants.
“I've noticed that the students were changing the way they consume the information, how they react to information, and how they engage with information and sources,” notes Klimova. “We have a more diverse student body now and we have noticed the increased visibility of LGBTQ+ students, students of color, students with disabilities, and students with mental or emotional health issues—all of this needed to be addressed in the classroom.”
Klimova has been recognized multiple times for her curricular innovations—she has received many grants and awards for her efforts to make her courses more inclusive, engaging, innovative and meaningful. A 2023 Bellet Award recipient, Klimova has also received the 2022 Diversity in the Curriculum Award, which allowed her to respond to the changing demographic of her students. She and her colleagues created guidelines for language instructors to modify classroom activities and language curriculum to make their teaching methods more inclusive and to introduce students to more nuanced and diverse cultural content. Klimova has also introduced a new grading system designed to be less stressful for students and to help them achieve their goals. Students participate in diversity-oriented and social justice–oriented assignments that allow them to engage with their chosen culture in unique ways.
Offers Klimova, “At the end of the year students put all these components of their proficiency: speaking, reading, writing, listening, and their creative projects, together in one portfolio, in which they reflect and assess themselves.”
Students have responded positively to the new course content.
“There has definitely been positive feedback from the students,” Klimova says. “The exposure has helped them to become more interested in cultures outside of Moscow and Saint Petersburg … We have a lot of heritage speakers in our classrooms, and many of them come from different parts of the former Soviet Union. For them, it's amazing because they have a chance to learn about the culture of their parents and to connect to their heritage. Definitely they responded very positively."
Once a Pitt graduate student herself, Klimova says she is glad she chose the Dietrich School as her academic home as an instructor.
“I remember a lot of my peers from the graduate school were writing dissertations on such amazing, exciting topics. Some of them were such unconventional topics, I was surprised that they allowed us to do this. This freedom—I can do research on the topics which excite me, and I can teach courses that I want to teach. I developed a course called the Chernobyl Memory Museum, which focuses on the representations of Chernobyl in culture, art, cinema, graffiti, etc. This course is interesting, exciting, and also beneficial, because, while talking about Chernobyl, we're talking about geopolitical situations, we are talking about the war in Ukraine because it is all connected. We talk about global nuclear anxieties, which are not just contained in one geographical region; it's global, it's universal. Students engage with this material so they can see what is happening in their own culture, in their own country. This is definitely exciting.”
In Protest Culture and Art in the Post-Soviet Space, a course developed by Klimova and launching in the fall of 2024, students will explore, within their socio-historical contexts, the works of art and the products of protest by artists, writers, architects, filmmakers, digital media producers, and journalists from the Baltic States, Belarus, Central Asia, the South Caucasus, Russia and Ukraine since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Similar to the course on Chernobyl (Klimova grew up in Belarus, which was significantly affected by the nuclear fallout in 1986), the course on cultural protest is very up-close and personal for her. In August 2020, Belarus went through political turmoil, and thousands of people took to the streets and created artistic products of protest to resist the regime. Teaching courses that are connected to her own cultural identity, beliefs, and values makes it even more exciting for her to cover these topics with her students.
“I am grateful to be a part of the Slavic Department's community because we have very generous, hard-working, and enthusiastic colleagues,” says Klimova. “We all work together in creating and offering new, exciting courses.”