In the past twenty years, Russian education has undergone transformations under the influence of global discourses. In this ethnographic study, I draw on Bakhtin's (1981) theory of dialogue to examine how actors respond to these transformations. The purpose of my study is threefold: to document the emic perspectives on the changes, to reconstruct the implicit knowledge embedded in teacher education institutions, and to use that knowledge to challenge assumptions carried by global discourses. This study offers a new perspective on contradictions that global reforms evoke and calls for ground-up research that will use local categories to challenge global neoliberalism.