Abstract
The platformization of education is reshaping professional identities and pedagogical practice in high-stakes, performance-based university entrance preparation. This article explores how private tutors serving Russia’s performing arts sector strategically construct hybrid roles as educators, entrepreneurs, and influencers, using Telegram as their primary infrastructure amid shifting regulatory and technological environments. Using qualitative reflexive thematic analysis of two million posts across 14 public Telegram channels (with audience sizes ranging from under 200 to nearly 23,000), the study reveals how tutors marshal platform affordances—including multimedia broadcasting, strategic channel-group integration, and personalized service offerings—to innovate pedagogically, perform credibility, and weather regulatory pressures. The analysis situates Telegram as an active medium shaping not only communication but also social organization, market differentiation, and boundary work between formal and informal education. The findings show tutors leveraging digital tools to institutionalize quasi-formal practices, personalize emotional and cognitive support, and survive in a volatile, policy-constrained ecosystem. By foregrounding affordance-driven analysis and the entrepreneurial turn in shadow education, this article contributes to new media studies, platform research, and educational theory, ultimately revealing how digital infrastructures are central to contemporary transformations in identity, pedagogy, and power in global education.
Keywords
Introduction
Moscow’s prestigious Boris Shchukin Theater Institute accepts only 30–80 students from 5000 applicants annually, creating an ultra-competitive landscape that has spawned a shadow education ecosystem worth billions globally (Boris Shchukin Theater Institute, 2025). Private tutors now leverage Telegram as their primary platform for building tutoring practices, navigating both market pressures and increasingly stringent regulatory controls on foreign messaging platforms (RIA, 2025). As Russian authorities restrict WhatsApp and Telegram while promoting the state-backed app Max, tutors face unprecedented challenges in maintaining platform-dependent professional practices.
Social media has reshaped higher education and informal learning ecologies, yet research on private tutoring for university entrance—particularly in performance-oriented disciplines—remains limited. This study examines how Telegram’s affordances mediate tutors’ professional identity work and self-presentation in actor/performer entrance preparation during a transitional regulatory period (August 2024–August 2025).
The analysis investigates how identity claims (educator, service provider, entrepreneur), service offerings (audition simulation, feedback, documented outcomes), and community-building practices are assembled within platform constraints and affordances. By situating tutors’ identity work at the intersection of shadow education and platform-mediated professionalization during regulatory change, this research contributes an empirically grounded account of how social media infrastructures mediate credibility, pedagogy, and market positioning in high-stakes admissions contexts.
Theoretical framework
This study brings together four perspectives: shadow education’s market dynamics, platformization’s restructuring of educational authority, platform affordances as relational analytical tools, and professional identity construction in digital contexts.
Shadow education and market dynamics
Shadow education refers to fee-based private tutoring that supplements mainstream schooling and focuses on examinable subjects (Bray, 2024; Hajar and Karakus, 2022). It is typically organized around formally taught curricula, delivered through private provision, and oriented toward success in mainstream assessments (Bray, 2024; Hajar and Karakus, 2022). In Russia, intense competition for elite institutions, rising middle-class incomes, and longstanding tutoring traditions generate strong demand for specialized preparation services (Donetskaya et al., 2023). Within this body of work, the performing arts sector remains under-examined, despite opaque entrance procedures, subjective evaluation criteria, and heavy reliance on tacit “insider” knowledge. This study addresses that gap by tracing how tutors in Russia’s elite theater admissions field use digital platforms to structure, communicate, and legitimize specialised preparation services.
Platformization of education
Platformization captures the growing dominance of digital platforms as infrastructures that organize educational delivery and relationships (Nichols and Dixon-Román, 2024). Platforms operate as socio-technical-economic systems that integrate technical design, user practices, and governance, and they act as de facto policy actors through algorithmic curation (Nichols and Dixon-Román, 2024). In education, this configuration reorders authority and power beyond simple digitization, as platforms mediate visibility, credibility, and access to learners and resources. Existing studies show how platformization redistributes pedagogical authority among institutions, commercial providers, and individual content creators, while embedding metric-driven evaluation logics (Poell et al., 2019; Van Dijck et al., 2018). Educational actors increasingly depend on privately governed infrastructures whose rules and business models sit outside traditional public oversight. Against this backdrop, the article positions Telegram as one such infrastructure and examines how its technical and governance features shape tutors’ professional identities, business models, and student relationships during a period of regulatory volatility in Russia.
Platform affordances
In this study, affordances are treated as possibilities for action emerging from the interplay between technological features, user capabilities, and situated practices, rather than as fixed properties of tools (Ronzhyn et al., 2022; Xue and Churchill, 2019). Their realization depends on user agency and context: past experiences, intentions, and relational dynamics in learning environments all shape how affordances are perceived and enacted, not just interface design (Araos Moya and Dama, 2023; Ronzhyn et al., 2022). Affordance-based analyses of educational technology highlight how actors selectively mobilize broadcasting, interaction, analytics, and circulation features to pursue pedagogical, commercial, or reputational goals. Applying this lens to Telegram means tracing how tutors work with channel–group architectures, multimedia messaging, cross-platform linking, and analytics (e.g., views, reactions) to construct identities, stage pedagogical processes, and manage communities. The emphasis falls less on what Telegram “is” and more on what tutors are able to do with it in a specific regulatory and market context.
Professional identity construction
Professional identities are approached as ongoing projects of strategic self-presentation, narrative adaptation, and negotiation with multiple audiences under shifting conditions. Rather than treating identity as fixed, this perspective foregrounds agentic enactment and identity work, whereby individuals adjust self-conceptions and visible behaviors in response to feedback, expectations, and contextual demands (Creary et al., 2021; Slay and Smith, 2011). For professionals outside traditional institutional boundaries, such as private tutors, identity construction is often plural and dynamic, combining educator authority, entrepreneurial agency, and service-oriented responsiveness (Creary et al., 2021). Identity work also draws on multiple forms of capital—embodied skills, cultural credentials, and institutional affiliations—which are especially salient in flexible arrangements such as private tutoring (Creary et al., 2021; Tomlinson and Jackson, 2021). In theater preparation, tutors mobilize embodied capital (performance experience, pedagogical skill), cultural capital (degrees, workshop affiliations, ties to “Golden Five” institutions), and institutionalised capital (formal qualifications and positions) to claim legitimacy, while simultaneously cultivating platform-native capital such as follower counts, engagement metrics, and cross-platform visibility.
Boundary work
Boundary work refers to deliberate efforts to shape social, symbolic, material, or temporal boundaries that affect groups, occupations, and organizations (Langley et al., 2019). Such efforts may defend or extend professional jurisdictions, maintain autonomy, and exclude competitors, thereby securing resources, power, and status. Langley et al. (2019) identify three broad strategies—expansion, monopolization, and protection—that help analyze how professionals manage their position vis-à-vis adjacent fields. In educational contexts, tutors enact boundary work when they navigate divides between formal and informal learning and balance credentialed expertise with experiential and platform-based authority. They must situate themselves in relation to universities’ programmes, entrance commissions, and state regulation, while offering distinct value propositions to students and parents. In the performing arts admissions niche, this involves translating opaque institutional expectations into concrete preparation regimes, framing services as complementary rather than oppositional to official training, and presenting themselves as mediators between students and elite institutions.
Conceptual integration
Taken together, these strands support a conceptualization of Telegram’s affordances as enabling Russian theater tutors to: (1) construct hybrid professional identities that blend educator authority, entrepreneurial capability, and service responsiveness; (2) perform boundary work that aligns with institutional requirements while preserving informal flexibility; (3) adapt to regulatory pressures through multi-platform strategies and backup infrastructures; and (4) scale intimate pedagogical relationships through strategic use of broadcasting, group interaction, and multimedia documentation. Platforms are therefore treated as active mediators that shape which professional identities and pedagogical practices become possible, viable, and valuable, rather than as neutral channels that simply deliver pre-existing tutoring models.
The Russian context
Performing arts entrance system
Russia’s elite performing arts institutions maintain extreme selectivity. The Boris Shchukin Theater Institute accepts 30–90 students annually from approximately 5000 applicants (below 2% acceptance rate). Similar institutions including GITIS (Russian Institute of Theater Arts), VGIK (All-Russian State Institute of Cinematography named after S. A. Gerasimov), and RGISI (Russian State Institute of Performing Arts in Saint Petersburg) maintain comparably competitive admissions involving multi-stage assessments of performance skills, physical capabilities, and theoretical knowledge. The inherent subjectivity of artistic evaluation combined with fierce competition generates substantial demand for private preparation services promising insider knowledge and competitive advantage.
Telegram’s dominance
Telegram has achieved exceptional penetration in Russia with over 35.06 million monthly active users averaging 3.45 hours of monthly usage—the highest globally (Demandsage, 2025). For educational communication, Telegram offers distinct advantages: channels for one-to-many broadcasting, groups for many-to-many collaboration, extensive multimedia support, minimal technical barriers, and cross-platform accessibility. This dual architecture enables tutors to maintain authoritative positioning through channels while facilitating interactive learning through groups.
Transitional regulatory period: August 2024–August 2025
Between August 2024 and August 2025, Russian authorities imposed escalating obstacles for Telegram and WhatsApp in a clear chronological progression: officials first urged caution about restricting Telegram, emphasizing its role in state-citizen communication (Kommersant, 2024a); then, Roskomnadzor announced partial blocks on messenger calls, blaming both apps for criminal misuse and noting that telecom anti-fraud measures had pushed fraudsters to foreign platforms (Kommersant, 2025a); after launching the national messenger Max, parliament discussed stricter measures but confirmed no immediate bans, while both platforms were repeatedly fined for regulatory violations (Kommersant, 2025b); by September, regulations required preinstalling Max and RuStore on all new devices (Kommersant, 2025g); throughout late summer and autumn, regional service disruptions, blocked user registration, and SMS verification failures increased, alongside mandatory blogger registration and tougher content compliance, culminating in October with a 7 million ruble court fine for Telegram’s repeated noncompliance (Kommersant, 2025c; 2025d; 2025e; 2025f).
This transitional period is analytically significant because it creates uncertainty driving adaptive strategies, introduces geographic variation enabling natural experiments in platform dependence, and establishes competitive pressure from state alternatives. However, I acknowledge potential survivorship bias: tutors remaining visible on Telegram through August 2025 may be disproportionately tech-adaptive, risk-tolerant, financially successful, and entrepreneurially oriented—potentially overrepresenting adaptive practices while excluding tutors who migrated to other platforms, reduced visibility, or exited entirely.
Research questions
This study addresses four primary research questions:
Significance of the study
This research provides the first comprehensive analysis of professional identity construction and platform navigation in shadow education for high-stakes university entrance during regulatory transition. For researchers, the study extends theoretical frameworks of identity, boundary work, and platformization to understudied shadow education contexts. For practitioners, findings offer actionable insights into digital self-presentation, platform constraint navigation, and hybrid professional identity construction. For students and parents, the research illuminates credibility construction strategies enabling informed evaluation of shadow education providers. For policymakers, the study reveals how shadow education adapts to regulatory pressures, raising questions about effectiveness of platform restrictions and unintended consequences of digital sovereignty initiatives.
As regulatory environments globally continue evolving—from EU data privacy regulations to digital sovereignty initiatives worldwide—this research offers empirically grounded analysis of how educational actors navigate the interplay of platform affordances, market pressures, and state control in shaping contemporary educational practice.
Methods
Design and setting
This qualitative study employs reflexive thematic analysis to examine how tutors build professional identities on public Telegram channels and groups for performer entrance preparation in Russia. The timeframe, September 2020–August 2025, is selected to capture both established practices and adaptations to increasing state regulation and platform restrictions from August 2024 onward. Survivorship bias is acknowledged, as tutors who remained visible on Telegram by August 2025 likely represent those able to navigate digital and regulatory hurdles, potentially overrepresenting adaptive strategies. Nevertheless, the sample illuminates how tutors successfully adjust to constrained online environments. Public Telegram spaces, due to platform policy and encryption, offer an ideal setting to analyze these evolving identity practices.
Sampling strategy
I identified public Telegram channels and groups administered by private tutors explicitly focused on actor/performer entrance preparation through a three-phase process:
Final sample characteristics
The 14 channels varied substantially: subscriber counts ranged from 186 to 22,847 (median: 3412); posting frequency ranged from 2 to 45 posts weekly (median: 12); administrators included 9 individual tutors, 4 tutoring collectives, and 1 tutor-influencer; 11 focused on Moscow, 2 on Saint Petersburg, 1 multi-city; 8 had associated private groups; 6 operated as broadcast-only channels. This diversity provides rich variation for examining how tutors adapt platform affordances to their market positioning.
Data collection
Data were collected using Telegram Desktop’s “Export Telegram Data” function, archiving all posts and media from the selected channels and groups between inception and August 31, 2025. This export included pinned items, message text, metadata (timestamps, view counts, edits), and associated media files. The resulting corpus consisted of 2,094,867 posts over 59 months, comprising 47.3 million words of text along with 142,387 images, 38,564 videos, 12,847 audio files, and 9234 documents, with an average of 149,633 posts per channel.
Analytic approach
I employed Braun and Clarke’s (2023) reflexive thematic analysis adapted with AI-assisted coding. AI served as a coding assistant implementing human-developed frameworks under continuous oversight—not fully automated coding.
Quality assurance
Systematic human validation employed stratified sampling based on confidence levels: 10% of high-confidence codes (agreement rate: 94.3%), 30% of medium-confidence codes (agreement rate: 87.6%), 100% of low-confidence codes (62.4% confirmed), and 100% of flagged items. Overall agreement: 89.7% across validation checks. Codebook refinement merged redundant codes, split overly broad codes, and added new codes identified by AI. Peer debriefing with three external colleagues at critical points strengthened interpretive validity.
I prioritize transparent documentation over traditional inter-rater reliability statistics (inappropriate for reflexive TA epistemology), implementing qualitative-based reliability measures including audit trails, peer examination, reflexivity, thick description, negative case analysis, and member resonance validation with two Russian performing arts tutors. While the stratified validation approach demonstrates strong agreement rates across confidence levels, a methodological limitation warrants acknowledgment: given that AI coded approximately 2 million posts while human validation covered only a fraction through stratified sampling, there remains a possibility of systematic coding errors in patterns not captured by the validation sample. This constraint is inherent to big data qualitative research employing AI assistance and does not undermine the validity of identified themes, but rather reflects the trade-off between corpus scale and validation depth. Future methodological work should continue refining validation protocols for AI-assisted qualitative analysis, particularly for identifying low-frequency but theoretically significant patterns.
Reflexivity
The author is a Russian sociologist with expertise in youth studies, sociology of education, and mixed methods research. This positioning provided advantages (native Russian fluency, deep cultural understanding, familiar with Russian social media norms) but introduced potential biases (insider normalization of practices, over-emphasis on theoretical frameworks, assumptions about motivations). The researcher maintained reflexive journals examining how positions shaped interpretation, actively sought contradictory evidence, consulted external colleagues, and interrogated taken-for-granted aspects of Russian educational culture.
Ethics
The study engages only with publicly accessible channels in accordance with the Association of Internet Researchers’ (AoIR) context-sensitive ethics. De-identification procedures pseudonymize all identifiers. Given Russia’s regulatory environment, the study strictly refrained from intervention that could increase participant risk. Risk was assessed as minimal given the public nature of data, educational context, and tutors’ deliberate professional self-presentation for marketing purposes.
Results
Across the 14 channels analyzed, tutors use consistent strategies to construct professional identities, leverage Telegram’s features, frame their services, and position themselves relative to formal university entrance processes. To protect participant privacy while maintaining analytical transparency, pseudonyms are used for all channel names and instructor identities.
RQ1: Professional identity construction
The analysis identified three main dimensions of professional identity work on Telegram: educator authority grounded in institutional capital, service provision with therapeutic positioning, and entrepreneurial innovation that often includes vulnerability-based authority.
Educator authority through institutional capital
Prestigious institutional affiliations appear prominently in channel descriptions and pinned posts, establishing pedagogical credibility from the first encounter. Kuzyadream, for example, presents its instructor as “a graduate of the Moscow Art Theatre School and theater and film actor” and documents placements in Russia’s “Golden Five” theater institutions, specifying outcomes such as “Students admitted to Kazan Theater Institute and RGISI” with named workshops and instructors. Across channels, credentials are described in similar detail. Teatralnii23 introduces its instructor as “Graduate of Shchukin Theatre Institute, workshop of [Instructor Name], 2018; Currently teaching at [Institution Name],” while pappostupayu adopts a team-based model, listing instructors with years of experience, conservatory degrees, specialist certifications, and psychological counseling qualifications. Together, these profiles frame channels as quasi-institutional faculties rather than individual freelancers.
Service provision and therapeutic positioning
Tutors emphasize accessibility, individualized attention, and emotional support alongside technical training. @postteatraniy advertises “20-minute individual lessons for ‘Error Correction’” that address “nasality, tension, breathiness,” with “Limited slots available each week; book within 48 hours of announcement.” Other channels explicitly foreground emotional labor. “Admission is good” tells applicants: “Remember! Admission is not punishment, but an unforgettable adventure. ALWAYS with a positive ending,” and describes preparation as “A journey of self-discovery” and “An opportunity to grow as an artist and person.” Team introductions state that “Nothing heals like meetings with amazing people and creativity from the first moments of acquaintance.” @bravo_spasibo posts on “dealing with rejection,” “managing audition anxiety,” “building confidence after setbacks,” and “maintaining mental health during preparation,” reassuring students that “Rejection is not a verdict on your talent… That ‘no’ doesn’t mean you’re not an artist—it means that particular jury, that particular day, that particular aesthetic wasn’t aligned with what you offered.”
Entrepreneurial innovation and vulnerability-based authority
Several channels adopt overtly entrepreneurial positioning. @akademy_camp foregrounds “YouTube following of 860,000 subscribers and over 1.1 million TikTok followers, with over one billion total views,” and describes its founder as “co-founder of Moryakov&Nikiforov Production LLC” as well as acting coach and entrance preparation specialist. @lubluvteatralny highlights “500+ educational videos on YouTube,” “20,000+ Instagram followers,” media features, and platform partnerships. Within this entrepreneurial framing, some tutors deploy vulnerability narratives as a source of authority. @bravo_spasibo states: “I’m unique – someone who was expelled from Tabakov College at 16 for professional unfitness,” but later “managed to get into 3 theater universities on budget, including Shchepkin Theatre School on Markina’s course. Now I help students avoid the mistakes I made and find their path to success.” Other posts recount repeated rejections, struggles with specific performance skills, family or financial pressures, and crises of confidence, typically resolving in eventual admission. These stories normalize failure while casting tutors as guides who have already navigated similar obstacles.
RQ2: Telegram affordances and self-branding strategies
Tutors mobilize Telegram’s affordances—channel–group architectures, multimedia messaging, community features, and cross-platform integration—for self-presentation and audience engagement.
Channel architecture and multimedia integration
Channels typically combine a broadcast space with interactive groups. @lubluvteatralny maintains a main channel (22,847 subscribers) for announcements, educational posts, and promotions, plus a discussion group (over 3200 members) for “mutual help among applicants” and additional groups for enrolled cohorts. Pinned posts serve as navigational hubs. A typical post on @podgotovkavteatr links “Our website,” Instagram, YouTube, a questions group, an enrollment form, and “Student reviews,” consolidating information about services and community spaces.
Multimedia integration allows tutors to show, rather than merely claim, pedagogical work and outcomes. Across channels, video content includes performance fragments (monologues, songs, movement exercises), short technique tutorials, feedback session recordings, and audition simulations that reproduce exam conditions. Audio materials provide vocal exercises, pronunciation drills, and warm-up routines; images include diplomas, anonymized admission letters, group photos, and infographics summarizing entrance requirements; documents circulate repertoire lists, past exam questions, reading lists, practice schedules, and application templates. @pedagog_morozova illustrates this integration in a post that reads: “Today in class we worked with water imagery for vocal expression. We filled the riverbed with vowels and moved the banks of consonants. This metaphorical sound work helps students connect emotional states to vocal production,” accompanied by a three-minute demonstration video, an audio “before/after” clip, and written home practice instructions.
Community building and interactive engagement
Eight of the 14 channels develop explicit community architectures linking broadcast channels with interactive spaces. The @lubluvteatralny ecosystem includes a “Main channel (broadcast only): daily tips, success stories, motivational content, service announcements,” a “General applicant group (public): peer support, question answering, resource sharing,” and private groups for current students and alumni. Interactive strategies transform content delivery into participatory learning. @podgotovkavteatr asks: “How does time affect character development in this Chekhov monologue? Write your idea in comments, and we’ll discuss approaches together,” while feedback rules instruct students to “comment on one strength and one area for growth.”
Other formats gamify participation. @teatralny_abityrient45 runs challenges such as “Week 3 Challenge: Perform your monologue in different emotional states (joy, grief, anger, calm). Submit by Friday for feedback.” Live Q&A sessions invite real-time interaction—“Thursday 8pm Moscow time: Live Q&A about GITIS entrance requirements. Post questions in advance”—and are held via voice or video. On @teatralny_spasibo, participants co-produce a “community-sourced list of recommended voice teachers, movement classes, therapy options in Moscow and St Petersburg.” Across the corpus, 21 distinct collaborative learning indicators and 76 patterns emphasizing creative process rather than one-way transmission suggest systematic use of participatory pedagogies.
RQ3: Service offering framing and effectiveness claims
Tutors frame their value through quantified success metrics, experiential audition simulations, methodological distinctiveness, and tiered pricing.
Quantified success metrics and outcome documentation
Channels often report admission outcomes with multi-year tracking and institutional breakdowns. Pappostupayu, for instance, lists year-by-year success rates (ranging from 75% to 87.5% between 2021 and 2024) and specifies how many students entered GITIS, the Moscow Art Theatre School, Shchepkin, and VGIK. Other channels name individual students (“Anna K., Shchukin Theatre Institute, 2023; Valery Fokin workshop”), aggregate placements (“15 students admitted to top-5 institutions, 2019–2024”), or use global figures (“Over 85% admission rate across all applicants, 2020–2025”). Several narrate preparation-to-admission timelines, as when @bravo_spasiko describes a student who joined in October, engaged in intensive voice and movement work with simulation sessions, and “was admitted to two institutions in spring admissions,” highlighting how longer preparation “correlated with more institution offers and scholarship opportunities.”
Audition simulation and skill development
Offerings often center on simulated audition conditions. @lubluvteatralny promotes “priced, capacity-limited Zoom trial sessions reproducing commission interaction: you perform your prepared monologue, receive immediate feedback simulating jury comments, experience time pressure (5 minutes for performance + feedback), and learn to manage real-time adjustment requests,” with “≤30 seats available per session; 750 rubles per participant; monthly sessions scheduled in advance.” Service descriptions divide training into domains: voice and speech (breathing, placement, articulation, emotional expression, accent reduction, text analysis), movement and physicality (body awareness, plasticity, stage presence, basic dance, combat), acting technique (emotional preparation, character analysis, scene work, improvisation, “truthful behavior under imaginary circumstances”), audition-specific skills (nerves, rapid preparation, responding to directors, interview skills, portfolio presentation), and repertoire (piece selection, verse/prose balance, memorization, subtext work). Teatralnii23 presents these in a modular menu—individual acting consultations, voice packages, full preparation course, intensive pre-audition week, and mock audition with video feedback—so that students can assemble programmes according to needs and resources.
Methodological innovation and proprietary approaches
Some channels differentiate themselves through branded methodologies. @pedagog_morozova describes a proprietary “ПОТОК (FLOW) methodology: stream-of-consciousness vocal expression training using elemental metaphors,” where students work with images of water, earth, air, and fire “to develop vocal range and emotional availability.” Posts emphasize “poetic imagery”—“Let the sound roll like a wave,” “Root your breath in your center,” “Allow words to float on air,” “Ignite passion in your voice”—as a route to “authentic emotional expression.” @akademy_camp promotes the “Nikiforov Method,” combining “classical Stanislavski training with modern content creation strategies” so that students learn both stage performance and camera presence, including “character work for social media personas, improvisation for authentic self-presentation, audience engagement techniques, personal brand development.” Across channels, tutors reference psychological counseling, specific movement and voice systems, and meditation or sports psychology to signal methodological sophistication.
Tiered pricing and service structuring
Tiered pricing offers multiple entry points. Pappostupayu again provides a clear example: entry-level products include digital “Program Files” (400 female and 300 male monologues with notes), single repertoire consultations, and one-month access to a recorded workshop library; mid-tier offers 4-week mini-courses on voice, movement, text analysis, and audition strategies plus small-group formats; premium tiers include a 12-week “comprehensive preparation” package, intensive 2-week pre-audition coaching, and full-year mentorship with unrestricted access. Additional income streams come from branded merchandise, paid access to workshop recordings, affiliate arrangements, and alumni network access. Prices frequently end in “00” or “50,” menus are ordered from accessible to premium options, and comparative and bundle framings (“less than the cost of two private lessons elsewhere,” “save 20% by purchasing the complete package”) encourage higher-value commitments.
RQ4: Formal–informal learning boundary navigation
Tutors position themselves in relation to formal institutions, construct hybrid authority, build community-based validation, and adapt to regulatory pressures.
Institutional alignment and strategic positioning
Tutors show detailed awareness of institutional expectations and present their services as tailored preparation. Teatralnii23 advises: “For GITIS admissions, ensure you have: classical verse (Pushkin strongly recommended), Soviet-era prose (Tolstoy, Gorky, or similar), contemporary dramatic monologue (post-1990), contrasting emotional pieces (one lyrical, one active/conflictual),” referencing recent exam trends, workshop-specific requirements, and changes in format. Channels also signal alignment via hashtags naming institutions, entrance exams, and leading workshops. Some explicitly clarify their status. @podgotovkavteatr writes: “We are not affiliated with any specific theatre university. Our goal is to prepare you for success at whichever institution best fits your artistic goals. We maintain respectful relationships with institutional faculty and stay current on their requirements,” and notes that some instructors hold institutional posts while others are independent professionals.
Hybrid authority construction
Authority emerges from a mix of institutional and alternative credentials. @bravo_spasibo combines a VGIK degree from a named workshop, teaching and assistantship roles, “8 years private coaching experience with 200+ students,” media commentary on entrance preparation, and a narrative of rejection and eventual admission that “resonates with students.” Platform-native signals—large subscriber bases, high view counts, extensive content portfolios, and dense testimonial archives—augment traditional credentials. Some channels explicitly distinguish their role from that of universities. @akademy_camp states: “Theatre universities teach you to be an actor. We teach you to GET INTO theatre university. These are different skills. Institutions focus on artistic development over years. We focus on audition success in months. Both are valuable; both are necessary,” framing tutoring as a specialized gateway service.
Community validation and peer authority
Channels cultivate community-driven validation mechanisms that supplement formal credentials. On @teatralny_abityrient45, tutors remind students that “THE STRONGEST WILL BE ADMITTED” and that “Moscow theatre universities received 5000+ applications for 200 total spots in 2024,” stressing the need for “serious preparation and honest self-assessment,” while testimonials showcase successful trajectories (“I was rejected twice before finding this channel. After 3 months preparation, I was admitted to Shchepkin and Shchuka. Couldn’t have done it without this community”). “Where Our Students Are Now” grids and real-time updates about offers from GITIS or other schools reinforce collective achievement. In group spaces, applicants ask for interpretation ideas, share discouragement after rejection, and offer to run practice auditions over video chat, framing success as a shared project within a semi-institutionalized peer community.
Regulatory adaptation and platform strategies
Tutors adopt platform-diversification strategies in response to regulatory uncertainty around Telegram and other foreign services. Educational content is repurposed across Telegram, VKontakte, YouTube, Instagram, and personal websites, with Telegram as community hub, YouTube for long-form tutorials, Instagram for short visual updates, VK for Russian-focused networking, and websites for formal service descriptions and enrollment. Posts frequently reference backup channels (“Join our VK group in case Telegram access issues”), VPN use, and domestic alternatives (“We’re now on Max messenger as well for those who prefer it”). @podgotovka123 explains: “Telegram serves as our community hub, but comprehensive resources live on our website. YouTube hosts full tutorials. Instagram provides daily motivation. VK maintains Russian community connection. Email list ensures direct contact regardless of platform changes,” treating platforms as interconnected nodes. References to backup channels and alternative access methods increase sharply after mid-2024, indicating active monitoring and rapid adaptation to emerging restrictions.
Discussion
Professional identity as strategic performance in shadow education
In this study, tutors use Telegram to stage professional identities that respond directly to platform affordances and volatile market conditions, weaving together institutionalized cultural capital, experiential expertise, platform-native authority, and relational authenticity to remain visible and competitive in shadow education markets (Bourdieu, 2018). Rather than simply displaying credentials, they juxtapose vulnerability-based narratives with entrepreneurial signaling, therapeutic care, and detailed outcome documentation, extending earlier accounts of educator self-presentation on social platforms and broadening what counts as “hybrid” educator identity in teacher social media research (Ulla et al., 2024). Performing arts tutors also confront distinctive credibility demands: they must signal artistic judgment, embodied skill, and emotional intelligence in ways that cannot be easily reduced to test scores, and so rely heavily on multimedia demonstrations, granular credentialing, and community-verified social proof (Zhang, 2023). The strong therapeutic orientation visible across channels situates this identity work within a broader consumerization of education under high-stakes uncertainty, where tutors address anxiety, rejection, and identity formation alongside technical training in an intensely competitive environment (Juncos et al., 2017).
Platform affordances as educational architecture
Telegram’s affordances are assembled into an educational infrastructure that holds authority and accessibility together through what can be described as scalable intimacy: broadcast channels maintain an expert voice, while linked groups support participatory learning, ongoing peer interaction, and affective care (Ansari and Khan, 2020). This architecture complicates simple oppositions between personal connection and instructional control by showing how platform-native design can sustain collaborative learning at scale in ways that resemble creator education yet remain anchored in high-stakes entrance preparation (Burgess and Green, 2018; Duffy and Pooley, 2019). Tutors extend this logic across media by orchestrating Telegram, YouTube, Instagram, VK, and dedicated websites as a single ecosystem, addressing the “partial realisation” problem through careful matching of media to specific pedagogical, promotional, and communicative functions rather than relying on a single platform (Manca, 2020; Ronzhyn et al., 2022; Xue and Churchill, 2020). In this configuration, platforms become configurable learning environments whose affordances are actively mobilized to deliver, coordinate, and evidence instruction, instead of passive conduits for pre-defined pedagogies.
Service framing in competitive markets
Service offers are framed through a combination of quantified outcomes, simulated audition ecologies, branded methodologies, and tiered pricing structures that together produce accountability practices reminiscent of institutional reporting while retaining substantial flexibility (Bray, 2021). Simulation and process replication make tacit audition expertise teachable by making evaluation criteria explicit, rehearsing context-specific contingencies, and normalizing repeated exposure to high-pressure conditions (Crews and Papagiannouli, 2019). Embodied, metaphor-rich voice training and hybrid stage-camera preparation show how competitive shadow markets can act as laboratories for pedagogical experimentation, supporting arguments that shadow education can be a site of innovation while simultaneously raising questions about effectiveness and transferability into formal programmes (Bray, 2021). Layered offerings and progression pathways, supported by detailed pricing architectures, also illustrate how platform infrastructures facilitate the professionalization of tutoring business models in line with broader commercialization trends in shadow education.
Boundary work in platform-mediated education
Boundary work in this context positions tutoring as complementary to institutional training rather than as a direct substitute, with tutors aligning content to admission requirements, translating tacit institutional norms, and emphasizing personalized guidance and emotional support (Akkerman and Bakker, 2011; Gieryn, 1999). Through these practices, tutors extend their authority into admissions preparation and institutional navigation while leaving universities’ formal remit over long-term artistic training unchallenged. Platform-native credibility regimes—testimonials, placement showcases, and visible peer support interactions—then supplement institutional credentials, helping stabilize trust in informal learning arrangements where formal oversight is limited (Qureshi et al., 2023). Taken together, these dynamics cast tutors as mediators who translate opaque institutional demands into actionable preparation, bridging formal–informal divides without fully collapsing them.
Regulatory adaptation and platform resilience
Regulatory volatility prompts tutors to adopt platform-resilient strategies that include multi-platform presence, redundant communication channels, and pre-planned audience migration pathways, revealing a level of political risk awareness that is largely absent from mainstream edtech narratives (Rivas, 2023). Spikes in cross-platform messaging and backup-channel promotion during periods of restriction suggest continuous monitoring of regulatory signals and rapid organizational adjustment consistent with entrepreneurial survivorship under platform uncertainty (Poell et al., 2019). At the same time, survivorship bias remains a central caveat: tutors who remain visible on Telegram are likely to be disproportionately adaptive, resource-rich, and entrepreneurially oriented, which means that the strategies documented here may reflect the practices of the most resilient actors rather than the full spectrum of shadow education providers. Future research designs that also reach tutors who migrated, reduced visibility, or exited in response to regulatory pressure are therefore essential for a more complete account of adaptation.
Theoretical integration: Platforms as constitutive mediums
Overall, the findings support a view of platforms as constitutive digital mediums that shape which educational practices become possible, visible, and valuable, rather than as neutral pipes through which pre-existing pedagogies simply flow (McMullan, 2020). Telegram’s channel–group split, multimedia flows, and cross-linking affordances co-produce particular forms of professional identity, pedagogy, and community organization, reinforcing broader arguments that platformization restructures educational governance and authority through socio-technical architectures (Nichols and Dixon-Román, 2024; Rivas, 2023; Van Dijck et al., 2018). Treating platforms as active mediators helps explain why ostensibly similar tutoring goals take different operational forms across media ecologies and foregrounds the role of design and governance choices in shaping educational futures.
Limitations
The focus on public channels centers visible, performative identity work and excludes private pedagogical spaces; triangulation through interviews, observation of private groups, and ethnographic approaches would clarify how closely performed and enacted practices align. Survivorship bias warrants careful consideration in interpreting these findings. Tutors remaining visible and active on Telegram through August 2025—despite escalating regulatory pressures—likely represent a non-random subset of the broader shadow education market. Specifically, this survivorship sample may overrepresent: (1) technological adaptability—tutors with multi-platform capabilities and technical fluency to navigate restrictions, (2) risk tolerance—those willing to maintain presence on increasingly scrutinized platforms, (3) financial resources—established practices with sufficient income to weather regulatory uncertainty, and (4) entrepreneurial orientation—individuals treating tutoring as a business requiring platform innovation rather than supplementary income. Consequently, the adaptive strategies documented—multi-platform architectures, sophisticated community building, vulnerability-based branding—may reflect practices of the most resilient market actors rather than typical shadow education provider responses. Tutors who migrated to alternative platforms (VK, Max, Yandex services), reduced public visibility, shifted to private referral networks, or exited the market entirely remain invisible in this analysis. Mixed-method approaches combining digital trace data with interviews targeting both visible and migrated providers would better characterize the full distribution of responses to platform uncertainty and regulatory pressure. The hybrid human–AI coding approach was systematically validated but did not use conventional inter-rater statistics; future work should continue developing interpretivist validation standards for AI-assisted qualitative analysis, including protocols for detecting systematic mis-coding at scale (Braun and Clarke, 2023). The absence of direct participant perspectives limits claims about effectiveness and student experience, pointing to the value of learner-centered studies and outcome tracking. Finally, the contextual specificity of this study—Russia’s performing arts sector during a regulatory transition with Telegram dominance—cautions against straightforward generalization to other subjects, countries, time periods, or platform ecosystems, and a platform-centric lens risks downplaying socioeconomic inequality, cultural capital distributions, and labor-market dynamics that structure who can access and benefit from these practices (Bourdieu, 2018; Manca, 2020).
Implications and future directions
For research, comparative and cross-national studies can test how far these patterns extend across subjects, platforms, and regulatory regimes, while longitudinal designs can trace how professional identities, service architectures, and platform ecologies evolve as policies and affordances shift (Poell et al., 2019; Rivas, 2023). For practice, the scalable intimacy architecture and platform-agnostic design documented here offer concrete models for balancing authority and participation, and the integration of therapeutic support underscores unmet needs around emotional and psychological care in high-stakes educational transitions (Ansari and Khan, 2020; Manca, 2020). For policy, the analysis suggests that shadow education mediates both institutional opacity and emotional burdens; policy interventions that support transparent admissions guidance and student well-being, while guarding against exploitative tutoring practices and considering the distributional effects of platform restrictions, are likely to be more equitable than blunt bans or laissez-faire approaches (Bray, 2021).
Conclusion
Private tutors in Russia’s theatre admissions sphere fuse institutional and platform-native capital to build hybrid professional identities, orchestrate Telegram-centered ecosystems that scale intimacy, and frame services through outcome quantification, simulation, and pedagogical innovation, while engaging in boundary work that complements formal education amid regulatory uncertainty. Conceptualizing platforms as constitutive mediums clarifies how affordances actively shape identity, pedagogy, and market positioning; as platformization deepens under shifting regulatory regimes, critical engagement with platform design and governance becomes central to debates about equity and effectiveness in contemporary education.
Supplemental material
Supplemental Material—Selling preparation, selling self: Platformization, professional identity, and regulatory adaptation in Russian artistic tutoring on Telegram
Supplemental Material for Selling preparation, selling self: Platformization, professional identity, and regulatory adaptation in Russian artistic tutoring on Telegram by Oxana Mikhaylova in Convergence.
Footnotes
Ethical considerations
The study engages only with publicly accessible channels in accordance with the Association of Internet Researchers’ (AoIR) context-sensitive ethics. De-identification procedures pseudonymize all identifiers. Given Russia’s regulatory environment, the study strictly refrained from intervention that could increase participant risk. Risk was assessed as minimal given the public nature of data, educational context, and tutors’ deliberate professional self-presentation for marketing purposes.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Data Availability Statement
The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, upon reasonable request.
Supplemental material
Supplemental material for this article is available online.
References
Supplementary Material
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