Studying local, exploring urban: educational geography and kraevedenie in Soviet Russia in the 1920s

Researchers attest to the scarcity of research on the images of regions in educational literature, and the history of Russian and Soviet pedagogy is no exception. This paper focuses on the first post-revolutionary decades of its development. The local studies movement (Kraevedenie) had a significant impact on the formation of the so-called "Labour school" (Trudovaya shkola), which fundamentally transformed Soviet education by this period. The article presents the results of the study of the textbooks and methodical texts of the 1920s and early 1930s. The aims of the paper are (1) to describe the development of the local studies movement in Soviet Russia and its influence on the formation of the school curriculum in the 1920s-1930s; (2) to explore the relationship between the ideas of localisation and the transformation of the body of school literature, to identify the types of teaching aids which implemented these ideas; (3) to analyse the role of urban issues in the curriculum and manuals of the 1920s, created under the influence of local studies.