The paper presents insights drawn from researching the discursive construction between 2000 and
2017 of new values-systems that guide, and force, change in Teacher Education within Higher Education
in the Russian Federation. It considers particularly the imaginaries and values that underpin
official policy documents related to Higher Teacher Education within the broader field of educational
policy across this time scale of almost two decades. The central focus rests on the challenge of
researching the construction of a driving discursive context for change, subsequently consolidated
through the activities of the Modernisation of Teacher Education Project (MoTEP) which was officially
launched by the Ministry of Education and Science in 2014. It is not the intention of this
paper to discuss in any great detail the nature and practice of Russia’s Teacher Higher Education in
itself; for this we suggest Sobolev’s (2016) excellent account. Rather, we focus on what can be learnt
from researching an aspect of one of the most intriguing and grand-scale policy-led projects of our
time; the rehabilitation of Russia as a global power. The research underpinning the paper draws on
Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) to explicate the nature and detail of the changes being promulgated
and the construction of these through policy work. It does so by evaluating a series of key policy
documents and discursive events that seek to redefine discursively the values-base of teacher education
in the Federation. For this, a discourse historical approach (DHA) is used, drawing primarily
on the ideas of Krzyżanowski (2010) and Reisigl and Wodak (2001; 2017). Sitting within the critical
discourse studies tradition this approach provides our guiding theoretical perspective and informs
the research methodology. Our analysis suggests that the values-system and imaginaries of teacher
education are strongly reliant on a unique and highly contextualised discursive construction and a
legitimation of policy-actions by means of references to strategies and visions for the ‘competitive,
innovative and leading economy’, and that the imaginaries and values that underpin Higher Teacher
Education in the Russian Federation, are challenging to research because they are considerably more
complex and multifaceted than much of the reform activity assumes.