The main goal of the secondary vocational education system is to fulfill the staffing needs of the Russian economy. The only way that we can effectively deliver on this objective is by ensuring there is a well-coordinated and stable system in place that allows vocational schools to cooperate with businesses. This article reviews how this cooperative relationship has changed over time, from the Soviet centrally planned model to the advent of market mechanisms. The authors pay particular attention to the specific features that distinguish the Russian labor market and the nature of youth employment in Russia, and they also examine the particular means and models whereby the vocational education system is able to “read signals” that emanate from the labor market and to quickly respond to these signals.The article’s findings may be of interest to administrators who work in the secondary vocational education system, experts as well as to anyone who takes an interest in the relationship between the secondary vocational educational system and the labor market.
The study of Russian children’s illustrated magazines at the various stages of their formation and development remains a relevant topic due to the evolution of their printed forms in the context of the transformation of the media environment. The first Russian children’s magazine was Children’s Reading for the Heart and Mind [Detskoye chteniye dlya serdtsa i razuma] (1785–1789). This publication contributed to the creation of Russian periodical literature for children, and it provided the point of departure for the creative efforts of numerous publications that followed in its footsteps, including even present-day Russian children’s magazines.The aim of the present article is to study the evolution of the forms of Russian children’s illustrated magazines under modern processes of the transformation of the media environment. This goal has determined the objectives of the paper: to study empirical materials related to this topic, consisting of numerous children’s publications from different historical periods; identifying the relevant stages of the development of children’s periodicals; examining the content and formal characteristics of children’s periodicals; applying an integrated approach to working with the most important aspects of Russian children’s magazines in the process of transforming the media reality.Our research methodology is based on a structural approach, which has been updated to incorporate structural-functional, structural-formal, and system-synergetic approaches as well as linear regression methodology. The problems that arise from the epistemological context are determined by the significance of the integrated approach to the study of the formal structure of Russian children’s illustrated magazines. When we review the state of research in this area, we see that there have been very few studies of Russian periodicals for children despite the relevance of the topic.During the process of their formation and development, children’s magazines came into being as a special type of publication with varying subject-thematic, ideological, political, pedagogical, and commercial orientations. They differed in their target audience, content, and presentation, and they were made available to a wide circle of readers. The content of these publications mainly included fiction, journalism, nonfiction articles, sociopolitical commentary, entertainment, and advertising. We have provided a theoretical justification of our research methodology, which uses the general scientific structural method and facilitates the study of the evolution of Russian children’s illustrated magazines. The methodology has allowed us to draw conclusions about how their formal structure as well as the larger media environment were transformed over time.
The past academic year of 2018 was a significant one for education. We celebrated the 100th birthday of Vasily Sukhomlinsky. Unfortunately, it was met with little fanfare and in hushed tones: There were two or three conferences held in Sukhomlinsky’s memory and a few separate mentions in the media, despite the fact that UNESCO declared this year the Year of Sukhomlinsky. It really did, and we did not even petition them to do so.
A new minister was appointed to the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation, and she has continued the erroneous practice of passing reforms that are divorced from the ethos and social values of law, which previous ministers had also become infamous for doing. The ministry was renamed as the Ministry of Enlightenment and began to speak more actively about pushing through reforms that seem to be very strangely worded and are in any case meaningless. Far from being reforms, they in fact threaten to accelerate the collapse of the education system in the country. However, so far they have amounted to a division of the old ministry into two agencies and the renaming of one of them the Ministry of Enlightenment. It reminds me of the infamous flop of the Yo-mobile Russian electric car, which was the brainchild of a Russian oligarch and never got off the ground. So I propose calling the undertakings of the Minister of Enlightenment “Yo-reforms.”And we can only hope that these reforms go no further than the Yo-mobile, but it is nevertheless a pity that so much money has to be wasted on them in any case.
ABSTRACT The article provides a theoretical grounding for the use of resources that can support educational activities at inclusive schools. We designate those techniques that help include students in the decision-making process, teach the principles of cooperation, and develop teamwork skills. We outline the features of the third space approach, which can be used to create a special environment for learning and development at the inclusive school.
The article discusses the use of various institutions of scientific imperialism, including the institution of publishing academic articles in English, the institution of standardizing how research should be reported, and the institution of indexing of articles in two global databases. We show that the establishment of institutions of scientific imperialism entails a number of negative trends: slowing down the publication of articles, the loss of a national research culture, and formulating and presenting research results to fit the requirements of indexing databases. We identify possible approaches to mitigate the negative effects associated with the expansion of the institutions of scientific imperialism.
ABSTRACT Modern dictionaries define “authoritarian” (which traces back to the French “autoritaire” meaning “imperious”) as something characterized by the unquestioning submission to power. Scholars in education borrowed this term from social psychology, where it was used to analyze types of leadership in terms of how they influence group dynamics. Kurt Lewin (1939) singled out three styles of social group leadership: authoritarian, democratic, and lax. 1 Subsequently, this classification was used in pedagogical textbooks to describe how principals interacted with school faculty. Since the early 1990s, it has for some reason come to characterize the relationships that teachers have with their students, while supplanting the previous (very substantial and natural) classification of styles of pedagogical communication. The purpose of the article is to understand the reasons why these terms evolved in such a strange way, to a situation where traditional pedagogy began to be conceived of as authoritarian and was contrasted to a hypothetical “pedagogy of support.” 2
The article, which is based on the results of a survey of about 150 respondents between the ages of 43 and 65, presents a sociopedagogical reconstruction of how Soviet school students experienced romantic feelings and friendships in pioneer camps during the 1960s–1980s.The author analyzes and interprets interviews that were conducted with people who spent their childhood summer vacations at pioneer camps. We find that respondents clearly differentiate the romantic feelings and relationships that they had experienced into “liking/affection for someone” (an emotion or feeling), “romantic relationships between boys and girls” (acting in a relationship or behaving like a couple), and “love” (regardless of whether the emotion was reciprocated or not). Romantic experiences and relationships could develop over the time that the children were in camp (from expressions of mutual interest/liking to romantic friendships, and from romantic friendships to a situation when one or both adolescents fell in love). A situation in which romantic feelings and emotions were not reciprocated was not always perceived by adolescents as something negative. Often the romantic experience was considered to be sufficient in and of itself. Only a small number of adolescents actually developed romantic feelings while at camp, and romantic relationships were even rarer. The largest proportion of pioneers first experienced romantic feelings between the ages of 14 and 16. Feelings of liking, romantic friendship, and love could develop in various ways, whether between two adolescents who were vacationing at the same pioneer camp, a girl vacationing at the camp and a boy from a village located next to the camp, and an adolescent vacationing at a pioneer camp and a camp counselor. Adolescents used different strategies to express their romantic feelings, including in their romantic relationships. These strategies varied in the amount of perseverance that was applied to find reciprocity. The romantic feelings and attitudes of Soviet adolescents who were staying at pioneer camps were short-lived for the most part. They ended with the conclusion of the camp, and exceptions to this were rare.The ways that romantic feelings were expressed and romantic relationships developed included while communicating during slow dances; sitting together during events; jointly participating in games and leisure activities; exchanging letters through the camp mail system; and meeting in private (taking walks). Adolescents did not tend to verbalize their romantic feelings and relationships. Regarding couples whose relationships were known within a group of peers, the latter created a supportive and secure private space for them.
The article analyzes accounts of the regimented aspects of life at summer pioneer camps (daily routine, lining up, and marching in formation) as well as the informal aspects of children’s subculture. Our main source of information were publications in the Soviet children’s press and specialized periodicals in education from between the late 1950s and early 1980s. At that time, articles were regularly published on this topic, and magazine editors devoted special issues to how leisure activities should be organized at summer recreational camps. Our analysis of the periodical literature helps better understand the everyday life of Soviet children during the late 1950s to the early 1980s.
The article discusses the specific features characterizing the development of the market for commercial educational services under modern Russian conditions. The study finds that many parents have reacted negatively to the introduction of market forces to the education sector. Paid educational services provided by the school are not popular despite the fact that they offer a number of advantages. The results of the study have revealed a number of factors that have led to the expansion in the sector of informal education, includeing low teacher salaries, difficulties in registering a tutoring service business, the desire to reduce financial costs, and the fact that schools insufficiently prepare students to pass the Unified State Exam. The movement of students who seek assistance from the informal educational sector has placed a strain on the institutional relationships between students and teachers.
The article investigates the problem of how xenophobia developed in the education system of the Russian Empire. The study focuses on the historical and educational context. The main sources of research were academic studies and archival documents from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that bear witness to the official position and views on the educational system for non-Russian ethnic groups. Some statements and definitions that are found in various sources show that the xenophobia that was characteristic of this historical period affected academic research, ideas about education, and the consciousness of the larger society.
The formation of a vision common to all participants in the educational process is considered as one of the indicators of a school’s development. The article presents data on how members of the school community form a common vision of the use of information and communication technologies in the educational process. This data was obtained during the piloting of the SELFIE school self-assessment tool. It was found that all groups of participants in the educational process agree that the use of information communication technologies is important and desirable for their school. However, most schools do not apply any focused efforts to develop a common vision that is shared by members of their school.
The study’s relevance is due to the need to achieve a fundamental theoretical understanding of the type of professional teacher training and preparation that is demanded by society, government, and the professional teacher community so that teachers can effectively act as character educators. Such an understanding will make it possible to institute supporting norms and regulations so that teachers can develop and practice the necessary professional skills and personal behaviors when performing as learning and character development facilitators. Before we can solve this problem, we need a clear description of the normative image of the teacher as a character educator. The article presents the progress and results of our study, which was designed to determine the essential characteristics of the contemporary normative image of the teacher as a character educator. The research methodology of the study combined personality, activity, value-based, systems, and synergetic approaches. Research methods included a contextual analysis of regulations, comparisons, systematizations, interpretations, and generalizations. The article presents the rationale and results of a contextual analysis of the two basic professional standards governing teachers and specialists in character education. Ten criteria provided the basis for comparison, subsequent systematization, and interpretation of the data, including the consideration and acceptance of the personal and unique individual traits of students; the factors that determine the formation of the value systems of students; the personal qualities of students; factors that stimulate the development of self-organizational and self-management skills as well as personal self-development; the formation of the character education system and space; conducting group work and team building as well as establishing relationships; the design and organization of the character education work and various types of activities, and so on. Our analysis enables us to conclude that, given the existing regulations that govern the domain of character education, the normative image of the teacher as a learning and development facilitator can so far only be described as rather ambiguous and inconsistent. In addition, current provisions that frame the professional dimension of character education in Russia have failed to establish an adequate room for agency as an important modifier of the teacher’s ability to take initiative and exercise more effective instructional strategies across the functional areas and particular activities of character education.
In the 1930s, the Soviet government undertook great efforts to promote literacy and awareness in the countryside. Workers at cultural and educational institutions were entrusted with carrying out this task. The article analyzes the condition and historical development of izby-chital’ny [known in English as village “reading huts”] in the regions of the South Urals as centers of education and propaganda in rural areas. Little attention has been paid to this topic in the regional historiography. It is shown that there was a more extensive network of reading huts in the Chelyabinsk Region than in the Orenburg Region. The article explores how these reading huts mainly functioned throughout the region and what activities were commonly practiced at this institution. These included, among others, reading aloud newspapers and fiction that were intended for illiterate and minimally literate audiences, hosting reader conferences, and providing knigonoshestvo [a service of book delivery]. The article uncovers the main problems that faced reading huts in the region: insufficient funding, the expropriation of club buildings in a number of towns for purposes of grain storage, lack of equipment and furnishings, etc. Finding staff was perhaps the biggest problem that these institutions faced. Nevertheless, the mass popularization of this political and ideological institution was decisive to the formation of the Soviet citizen.
The article describes a new method for assessing the risk of bullying at school. We present certain results of international studies in the area of school bullying. We outline the reasons why it is necessary to develop assessment tools and school bullying prevention programs in Russia. We describe the process of developing, testing, and validating a methodology for assessing the risk of school bullying among schoolchildren. The sample consisted of 285 adolescents (53 percent girls) between the ages of 10 and 18. We demonstrate the underlying four-factor structure of the survey, which provides an optimal fit for the empirical data and includes insecurity, wellbeing, disunity, and equality scales.
This article delves into how specialists were trained in Siberia, and it reveals the roles of home education and of specialized educational institutions in seafaring and mining. The authors describe the tutoring system for people who received their education in Europe and Siberia. They also discuss the significance of internships at specialized enterprises in Europe.
The article provides an overview of relevant theoretical models of the stereotyping and representation of otherness. Based on an analysis of examples from literature and the mass media, the author follows S. Gilman in comparing the pathological and non-pathological forms for perceiving and representing Others. The first set of approaches takes a hegemonic attitude to otherness, whereas the second one recognizes that otherness has its own value. The author describes and gives examples of such pathological forms as depersonification, fragmentation, fetishization, exotization, pathologization, and homogenization. In addition, the author identifies three counter-strategies (nonpathological forms) for representing Others that are practiced in the media that challenge, overcome, and transform the dominant mode of representation: the creation of new positive stereotypes about Others; the application of positive images to those manifestations of otherness that are perceived as purely negative and undesirable; and finally the search for and confrontation of ambivalent stereotypes that are attributed to Others through a critical analysis of the discourse and allowing people who have been othered to be heard.
The article presents a sociological analysis of how young researchers in Kazakhstan have been able to develop their academic careers. We obtained a holistic overview of the status and career success of young academics based on data from a survey (consisting of personal formalized interviews as well as in-depth interviews), including an understanding of how young researchers are able to succeed and contribute to the development of academia in the country and what obstacles they encounter in this process. Particular attention is paid to the welfare status, life goals and values, and professional context in which early-career researchers work today, as well as to the modern challenges, risks, opportunities, and motivations that determine and shape their career paths in Kazakh academia.
The article is devoted to the problem of survey items that ask for sensitive information. This factor has a significant impact on the quality and comparability of data from international surveys. We propose a methodology that can be used to comparatively study the level of sensitivity of questions. It is often used in public opinion polls as well as in marketing and academic studies. We were able to use it to identify similarities and differences in what questions are considered sensitive by the different populations of the nine countries of the former Soviet Union as a whole as well as among particular socio-demographic groups. The study analyzes the reasons why certain questions are considered to be sensitive: the violation of various norms, whether legal or political, social or moral, communication etiquette or beliefs about what constitutes private information. We developed a classification of sensitive questions based on the reasons that were identified. The obtained results allow us to better understand the reasons of why certain questions are considered to be sensitive, to develop an approach to how this concept should be defined, and to identify the differences between sensitive questions and those that are perceived to have other qualities, such as those that are “threatening” and questions fraught with social desirability effect. The results of this comparative study can be used to improve the tools and to allow a deeper analysis of cross-national survey data.
The current state of childhood research is grounded in classical psychological theories, and Russian psychology is tied to cultural and historical theory in particular. These theories were invented to generalize and make sense of the realities of childhood as they existed at the time when these theories were created. Rapid social changes, especially during recent decades, have led to the emergence of a wide range of sources that bear witness to how the day-to-day life of childhood has changed. The understanding of childhood has continued to transform from one era to another. A metaphor was even coined to describe it, and at some point there was even a specific metaphor coined, “the disappearance of childhood.” This article seeks to explore how the image of childhood has changed in relation to the image of adulthood. As material for analysis, we chose Soviet and Russian movies from the 1940s to 2000s. The study is based on the assumption that a sequential analysis based on Yuri Lotman’s theory of the structure of the text demonstrates how the image of childhood changes over time. If in the 1940s and 1950s the child was presented as immature and not quite grown up, the adult was portrayed as the embodiment of the ideal form of the individual, and the main conflict was structured around childish immaturity, then gradually over the decades more and more main characters who were children and adults were portrayed as different kinds of individuals, and the child (or teenager) sometimes came to embody obviously negative features. The child–adult dichotomy itself lost its significance.
