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DIDACTIC KNOWLEDGE DEFICIT
FROM THE VIEW OF EDUCATIONAL PRACTICE
I. M. Osmolovskaya
The deficit of didactic knowledge due to the modern social and cultural situation, modernization of education, and development of scientific status of didactics has been pointed out and analysed. A new type of didactic research - research-project has been picked out.
Key words: didactics, social and cultural situation, modernization of education, deficit of didactic knowledge, research-project.
Society is developing dynamically, and the requirements on educational institution graduates are radically changing: as it has been repeatedly mentioned, a graduate must be ready to learn throughout life, to re-learn and adapt to the changing conditions of the labour market, to be able to work in a team, to plan one’s life, and achieve one’s life objectives. In this regard, the necessity of changes in educational practice is obvious, but in the national education they are often done without a deep theoretical foundation, without the support of didactic knowledge. It should be noted that there is significant scientific potential in didactics, which can become the basis for improving the educational system and enabling the modernization of education, making decisions not intuitively and spontaneously, but theoretically justified. On the other hand, the development of society puts a series of problems for the didactics which being solved will undoubtedly move it forward [1].
This article attempts to identify the existing deficit of didactic knowledge. Research of the available didactic knowledge and its relation to the demands of society towards education have made it possible to identify three groups of problems: (1) a deficit of didactic knowledge due to the change of the socio-cultural situation; (2) a deficit of didactic knowledge caused by the modernization of the Russian education system, (3) a deficit of didactic knowledge related to an increase of the scientific status of didactics. We will focus on the former two.
The first group of problems with didactic knowledge deficit is associated with the contemporary social and cultural situation, the demands of society toward school-leavers, the demands of the individual on education, enabling lifelong learning and solving various life problems on the basis of the acquired knowledge. Moreover, the development of information communication technologies and the information-educational environment influence the perception, processing and use of information. The digital age generation has come to school, for whom there is no problem learning to use various electronic devices since early childhood. In addition to the traditional age barrier, expressed in the "parents and children" conflict, different comprehension and understanding of the world by different generations is added, since modern children do not imagine their existence without information from the Internet. They read fewer books, which used to promote the development of imagination, fantasy. The so-called screen culture has formed; the word and the text as its representation have been pushed to the background. Reading textbooks, where the author’s thought is developed slowly and thoroughly,
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is rejected by a generation accustomed to actions in a dynamically changing environment. Optimal for perception is the picture with accompanying text, while the picture can be a drawing, a table, a chart, a diagram, i.e. anything that allows creating an image of the object being studied. Thinking becomes a "clip-like" mosaic. Studying the problem, we cannot obtain all the corresponding information, as there is too much of it. We snatch some fragments reflecting certain aspects of the problem, and by synthesizing them, we try to create a complete image of the studied object. According to A. Mole’s figurative expression, individual culture today is like "felt", whereas previously it was a "network", whose nodes contained the most important information [2].
The teaching process now does not look like it did 10 or 15 years ago. The information and communication technologies (hereinafter - ICT), being the basis of the information-educational environment (hereinafter - IEE), impart a distinct specific character to it. The process of learning can be represented as completely "immersed" in the information and education environment, and the student does not only experience its positive or negative effects, but actively interacts with the environment. It should be noted that no cardinal re-construction of the teaching process has been made with the advent of the ICT: ICT is actively used as a modern means of teaching, visualizing the studied material, increasing the emotional impact for assimilation of the studied content, providing gaming tools for the lessons, enhancing the interactivity of studies while relieving teachers from routine. The ICT do not replace teachers, but somehow modify their functions, giving the possibility to increase the degree of students’ independence in acquiring knowledge.
Development of didactic understanding of the teaching process with the application of ICT is associated with using information and educational environments and with the organization of the teaching process in these environments. The teaching practice expects from didactics the development of didactic aspects of IEE creation and implementation, embedding the students’ work into the traditional school reality, or a fundamental restructuring of this reality, the development of a didactic basis for new generation textbooks to be used with IEE. The modern ICT pose problems of interaction between the formal, non-formal and informal education, institualization of various forms of online education, coordination and alignment of individual educational trajectory of a student when studying at numerous open online courses. Special attention is required for identification of the specific character of adult education, principles of acquisition of subjective experience by adults, restructuring of the existing system of knowledge, views, values and meanings [3].
The second group of problems with didactic knowledge deficit arises in connection with the ongoing permanent modernization of Russian education, in which several trends can be singled out: the transition from a traditional knowledge-based approach to a competence-based one, development and implementation of educational standards in line with the activity-competence approach; narrowing the variability of education, respectively, strengthening of homogeneity in school; the formalization of school estimation. Traditionally, school education in Russia was academic, abstracted from human life problems. The change of society’s requirements on education caused a transition to a
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competence-based approach, raising the problem of formation of a competent person able to learn and relearn throughout his life. The standards require personal, metasubject and subject results of the educational process, and the teaching process must be aimed at achieving them. Emphasis is placed on the formation of universal educational activities. However, the introduction of standards in secondary school forestalled a thorough methodical development of ways of educational process restructuring, the development of new textbooks and teaching aids, and test materials that would enable teachers to independently assess the process of formation of student’s competencies.
Poor management impeded the implementation of second generation educational standards in school and caused confusion and rejection by teachers, and the emergence of the ideas to return to the old standards, which clearly defined the content of education to be taught in class [4]. The school activity assessment is formalized. An effective school is considered to be one in which students successfully pass the exam in the subject and win contests and competitions. No one cares how a child feels at school, if he/she is comfortable, whether he/she feels like a respectful person, whether he/she is trusted regardless of his school success, and is supported. The education evaluation criteria are becoming less humanistic, not reflecting the development of the child's psychological state in the school.
A series of interviews with comprehensive school deputy directors showed that school administrators and teachers of need a criterion base of assessment, teachers need to clearly understand at the beginning of the school year what children must learn, what criteria will be applied to check it. It is necessary to develop current control materials so that educators can estimate the effectiveness of their own work. Teachers do not understand what to do with metasubject competencies in basic school, on what materials are to be formed. In the interviews they noted that they tried to form the skills to work with texts, tables, and the ability to acquire and process information, but these skills acquired on the subject material are not generalized. There is no continuity in the educational process of the basic school of the work with the elementary school according to the federal state educational standards (FSES). The basic school does not have such equipment which they have in the elementary school. Therefore, it is likely that the rate of formation of research, educational and communicative competencies of students will slow down. There are no guidelines that could show teachers how to continue working at the basic school according to the competence approach. Teachers expect from didactics a solution of specific problems of the formation of a competent person who has mastered versatile educational actions, and is able to independently solve problems in different spheres of life.
So, is education modernization a result of the development of didactics, or is the development of didactics a result of modernization? It is impossible to say that currently all decisions on modernization of education are taken on the basis of scientific didactic knowledge. Crucial decisions in education, such as the introduction of the uniform state examination, standardization of education, and integration of educational institutions, in many respects, were not worked out theoretically and, accordingly, are not ready to be implemented in practice; the implementation is carried out "from wheels". Didactic is forced to develop teaching
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materials as an afterthought: The methods of preparation and conducting lessons are developed according to FSES; textbooks and tutorials are gradually changed, and information-educational environments are developed, especially in universities. The problem of diagnosing students’ competences is being solved with great difficulty.
Along with the empirical and theoretical investigations, a new type has appeared - a research project. In the course of such research, a new educational practice is created (tutoring, communicative teaching, the thought-activity pedagogy, self-learning organization). The theoretical ideas lying at its basis are being developed, concretized and complemented in the course of implementation,
i.e., theory and practice merge, and the urgent practical problem is solved “in the field”. The research project is not identical to empirical research, since practice is not only studied, but, first of all, is modelled. At the same time, a number of didactic achievements could eventually become the basis for the improvement of pedagogical practice, they are the studies resulting in a potential breakthrough: thought-activity pedagogy, communicative didactics, TRIZ-pedagogy, individualization of learning through tutoring, etc. The fundamental didactics forms the basis for such studies.
In general, it should be noted that didactics is developing in a multifaceted fashion and in different directions: there is breakthrough research, there are both fundamental and practice-oriented ones, aimed at solving urgent problems, including those arising from the ongoing modernization of education. Thus, the development of didactics and modernization of education are interrelated, the cause and effect are constantly interchanged, providing both the development of didactics and the development of education.
Reference Literature
1. Иванова С. В. О педагогическом познании // Педагогическая наука: генезис и прогнозы развития: сб. науч. тр. Международной научно-теоретической конференции в 2 т. / под ред. С. В. Ивановой, А. В. Овчинникова. - М., 2014. - С. 5-8.
2. Моль А. Социодинамика культуры: пер. с фр. - М.: Прогресс, 1973.
3. Ломакина Т. Ю., Сергеева М. Г. Современные технологии профессионального обучения в условиях перехода на компетентностно-ориентированное образование // Среднее профессиональное образование, 2014. - № 8. - С. 6-14.
4. Перминова Л. М. Методологическое обеспечение взаимосвязи школьных образовательных стандартов в условиях преемственности общего и высшего образования // Гуманитарные науки и образование. 2013. - № 4 (16). - С.55-59.
Translated from Russian by Znanije Central Translastions Bureas
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