Project Activity Of Students-Philologists In The Conditions Of Digitalization Of Education

Abstract

The article analyzes the results of the educational project "Collection of poems about the Great Patriotic War", carried out by students of Pskov State University in 2010 - 2021. Seventeen created collections allow you to see the diverse impact of modernization of the educational field in general and digitalization in particular, on the work of students on the project, as well as on the presentation of its results. First, over time, the editorial skills of students developed, since the problem of attribution of texts and the need to verify information obtained on network resources became more and more familiar to students. Secondly, the availability of digital technologies was reflected in the change in the appearance of collections: the share and variability of visualization elements increased significantly. Third, the emotional labeling of war fiction contributed to the development of emotional intelligence, and engagement in the work stimulated the desire to display its results in different venues. Fourth, the project (an independent selection of poems) gave students a new form of broadcasting historical memory. Fifth, over the years, the topics of the collections have been concretized and individualized, i.e. the creative component of the editorial board grew. During the work on the project, the student readers turned out to be not passive consumers of artistic information, but independent and full-fledged participants in the cultural and historical process, using for this the form of a book of poems that is relevant in modern literature, the editors of which they acted during the project.

Keywords: Collection of poems, educational project, philological education

Introduction

The digitalization of modern education is primarily associated with the transformation of traditional teaching methods and ways of organizing the educational process (Andryukhina et al., 2020; Huiwen Gao, 2021). Today, various educational technologies are being developed that adapt the learning system to the needs of a person in a post-industrial society and are aimed at creating an accessible digital environment in which specialized educational resources can be created: “Network resources can, according to various criteria, be combined into information segments, which are the basis for support and maintenance of professional educational spaces” (Belyaeva, 2015, p. 36). In the philological sphere, systemic changes in society and the formation of the information field are reflected in the creation of various resources (the largest is the "National Corpus of the Russian Language"), as well as in the practice of school language teaching. In the digital space, resources of the vocabulary and conceptualizing type (Mishatina, 2019) are distributed, intended for researchers - philologists, cultural scientists, sociologists. However, the possibilities of digital technologies and the potential of network resources in teaching literary scholars at universities are still not sufficiently understood (Belyaeva, 2015), although the aggregating resources on literary criticism and, especially, on literature are quite numerous.

Among the innovations in education caused by changes in human needs today, project technologies used at all levels of education dominate. They effectively combine educational goals of information processing, democratization of learning (Sardoč & Deželan, 2020) and the formation of communication skills. In connection with all of the above, the training of literary scholars and teachers with the help of project technologies is becoming an urgent task of university teaching. Consideration of the use of the digital environment in educational projects of students-philologists and teachers is of scientific interest from the point of view of modernization of education in the context of its systemic change towards digitalization and the development of communication practices.

Problem Statement

The transformation of the education system, taking into account the digitalization of the modern world and the growing importance of communication skills, is reflected in the spread of new ways of organizing the educational process. These include the introduction into the educational process of students' project activities, often associated with the use of digital resources and technologies (Aksenov et al., 2021). The use of project activities in higher education using digital resources is developing in relation to philological disciplines as part of interdisciplinary projects (Starchikova et al., 2018), for training translators (Bagdasarova & Ilyushchenko, 2020) and linguists (Belyaeva, 2015). With regard to the study of literature, design and digital innovations are considered less often and, as a rule, in an interdisciplinary line of study of reading practices (Tyupa & Sergeeva (Noskova), 2014), cultural history (Prodanik, 2020), psychophysiology of perception of different types of text (Clinton, 2019; Miall & Dobson 2001; Singer & Alexander, 2017), as well as the sociology of reading (Davis et al., 2020; Gerasimova, 2018).

The productivity of project activities at different levels of education follows from the general needs of education in the information society (Yakovleva, 2014) and from the possibilities of forming “living knowledge” on its basis. Danielyan (2017) describes such a student's activity, as a result of which he forms “a new ordering of the world that has not yet been mastered, which is relevant to the goals of the learner. This implies the ability of a person to fit into the "objective reality" he is assimilating and ordering as a subject of scientific and cognitive activity" (p. 73). The expressed subjectivity of this new form of organization of cognition corresponds to the emerging system of values ​​of the future, among which the possibility of realizing individual creative potential is put forward in the first place. Polat (2009), characterizing the project method, singles out “stimulating creative activity, improving the content of education and issues of interpersonal dialogue and personal self-realization of participants in educational interaction” (p. 5). One of the spheres of philological creativity is editorial work on the compilation of publications. It opens up great opportunities for project activities with meaningful use of the digital environment together with learners (Michael et al., 2021). Since the main transformation of knowledge transfer in the modern world is aimed at creating students' own creative product, the project for the formation of collections of poems has great teaching potential.

The purpose of this study was to describe the educational project "Collection of poems about the Great Patriotic War" taking into account the formation of skills in professional philological activity.

Research Questions

The authors of the article consider the influence of the modernizing trends in education and digitalization of the modern world, which is revealed in the analysis of the long-term work of students-philologists and student-teachers of Pskov State University on the educational project "Collection of poems about the Great Patriotic War." The main tasks of the authors in this work are as follows:

- description of creative subjectivity in the work on the project;

- identification of the benefits of digital registration of project results;

- description of the conditions for the formation of editorial skills of students when using digital resources;

- identifying the role of emotions and the development of emotional intelligence in the work on the project;

- characterization of the work on the project as the participation of a modern philologist in the actual literary process.

Purpose of the Study

The aim of the study was to identify features of modernization of education in the work of students of Pskov State University on the educational project "Creation of a collection of poems about the war". The project results - created in 2010-2021 thematic collections - provide sufficient material for analyzing the dynamics of work on the project.

Research Methods

The description of the project required the use of several methods.

A content analysis of the collections of poems compiled by students was aimed at identifying trends in the change in topics. The statistics of selected topics distributed over the years revealed a tendency towards their concretization: from general and broad (poems about the war) to narrower (poems about military friendship, about captivity, about war childhood, etc.). The variability of names was also taken into account, which reflected the theme of the collection invented by the students.

Comparison of the design of collections in the aspect of the use of visual elements showed the influence of the process of increasing the visibility of culture and the availability of digital technologies. The covers and page design as a whole were considered, the photos used and their arrangement in the collections, as well as the statistics of the used fonts, were analyzed. The observation results were supported by the analysis of students' reflections during the presentations of their projects. The appearance of the collections of recent years indicates a wider use of computer technologies in their design than before.

The sociological method made it possible to evaluate the project from the point of view of social and psychological significance. Taking into account the social roles of the participants in the literary process made it possible to determine the place of the student in it in the implementation of this project: changing the reader's role to editorial meant for him an increase in his own status and opened up the possibility of active participation in the historical and literary process. Sociological optics made it possible to link the results of students' activities in this project and the social processes that determine the structure of the literary field today.

Findings

Compilation of the collection as a project task meets a number of needs of a person of the “knowledge society”, in which “The task of education <...> is to organize the acquisition of knowledge with the dominance of constructive activity. This presupposes the actualization of the problem of cultivating the very subjectivity of a person” (Danielyan, 2017, p. 73). Involvement of students in the broadcast of historical memory - in this case, the memory of the Great Patriotic War - contributes to the personal development and formation of the professional self-identification of the philologist through editorial creativity.

Participation in the project develops the emotional intelligence of students. On the one hand, the development of the emotional sphere is associated with the perception of material that conveys traumatic military experience; familiarization with it through the artistic word, according to their confessions, is reflected in relationships even within families (in particular, the understanding of grandmothers is growing). On the other hand, emotional immersion in the work on the project stimulates students to actively present its results at different sites.

The main element of creativity in working on a project is searching / coming up with a subject for a collection. Analysis of the selected topics shows a tendency towards their concretization and individuality. Over time, they became more diverse, the vector of changing names moved from the affirmation of a feat to complicity in the transmission of subjective human experience. If in the 2000s and early 2010s dominated by such titles as "The feat of a soldier" or "Women in war" and the variability of topics within the groups was small, then at the end of the decade poems were collected about motherhood, war childhood, captivity, the blockade of Leningrad, military letters, military friendship. The concretization of the topic has caused the complexity of the criteria for selecting poetry. For example, in 2021, two collections with a geographic component were made; in one chronologically were poems dedicated to specific battles, in the other - written by authors who were born in cities that received the status of "City of Military Glory", and located as a reproduction of one day of the war.

In the aspect of the sociology of literature, the materials of the project testify to the transformation of reader participation in the existence of literature today, due to the digitalization of culture. Sociologists of literature call the segmentation of the literary field and its multiply increased focus on the consumer as the features of the current literary process (Bourdieu, 1992). In this situation, the figure of the reader comes to the fore: he not only acts as the main factor in the development of the book market, but also actively participates in the representation of literature. New ways of functioning of literature (mainly thanks to the Internet) also include new forms of representation of reader participation. Philology students, combining the functions of a reader and an editor in this project, become active participants in the actual literary process.

At the beginning of the XXI century such a literary form as a book of poetry has become actualized:

This is connected not only with the requirements of the book market (a book, effectively designed, the reader will sooner notice than a magazine selection of poems or a separately published poem), but also with the fact that in the “zero” years the lyrics took upon herself the functions of analyzing the socio-cultural situation, problematizing the new (post-Soviet) identity, refuting / restoring traditions, working out historical traumas. (Barkovskaya et al., 2014, p. 21)

The project of creating collections shows that in the same literary form, students in the role of editors reflect the same socio-cultural processes.

Strengthening visuality in the perception of information in the modern world is reflected in the design of collections. The share of visual elements in them has significantly increased over the 15 years of the project's existence. If at first they were present only on the covers, then gradually they spread to inserts between pages and the very appearance of pages, including pagination and headings. In visual imagery, students sought to emphasize the historicity of the material, using authentic photographs with panoramic images of battles or portraits. The dominance of this type of images in the design is explained by the fact that black-and-white photos are perceived today as a sign of a different, bygone era and testify to the historical distance between the material of the “book” / collection and the authors-compilers. In addition, they consider such photos to more accurately convey the desired range of emotions, mainly mournful ones. Using modern photo processing technologies, students in 2020 made them the background of the pages. Historically, fonts have also played a distancing function; they selected those close in appearance to newspaper or book fonts of the Soviet era (often Bookman Old Style or Cambria); the usual Times New Roman for documents was perceived as too "simple" and "inexpressive". As for the symbols - the St.George ribbon or the image of the Order of the Red Star - in several collections they marked the page numbers (they were put on the cover only once). The tendency towards an increase in the share of visual images in collections is especially pronounced in the inclusion of portraits of poets in them. Until 2017, the portrait of the author of the poems was used only if the collection was monographic (2 times). In the last 3 years, this design element has become ubiquitous. The obligatory face of the author next to his poem can be explained by two factors: the popularity of the "Immortal Regiment" campaign and the habit of using pages on social networks or Wikipedia.

The selection of poems on their own topic allows students to develop editorial skills, including the skill of verifying information, critically assessing resources, comparing them and referring to printed sources for clarification. The number of resources containing the texts of poems created during the Great Patriotic War or dedicated to it is growing from year to year and is determined by the historical significance of the theme of war in our country. Getting acquainted with the presented materials, students improve their digital reading skills in comparison with printed ones (Miall & Dobson, 2001; Singer & Alexander, 2017), as well as, by structuring information in an independently specified channel, the skills of its processing.

Conclusion

Analysis of the implementation by students of Pskov State University of the educational project "Creation of a collection of poems about the Great Patriotic War" and its results - 17 collections created in 2010 - 2021 led to the following conclusions.

1. Students' work on the project illustrates the general trend of modern culture towards the development of individual creativity. With regard to the present day “... projectivity, as a property of the creative mind and cultural activity, is experiencing a rapid rise. The aggregate information wealth of mankind is growing rapidly, but even faster is the ability to transform the world. In the XX and XXI centuries, the projective principle is increasingly strengthening, blurring the line between the subjective and the objective and displacing other types of intellectual activity” (Epshtein, 2016, p. 108). The individuality of the collections created by the students turned out to be such a clear and important component of the project that when it was digitized - the page "Evil of War and the Benefit of Peace" was created on the Pskov State University website, the undergraduate editors came to the decision to preserve the appearance, composition and design of different collections as much as possible, despite some repetitive they have elements (same verses).

2. The collections created today give the form of a living historical memory of the Great Patriotic War and are perceived as a personal contribution to a socially significant tradition. In the course of working on a project, student readers become not passive consumers of artistic information, and not its distant researchers, but independent and full-fledged participants in the cultural and historical process.

3. Emotional marking of works of art about war contributes to the development of emotional intelligence in students, and immersion in the material stimulates the desire to communicate and broadcast the results of the project on different sites.

4. Working with materials located on network resources confronts students with the problems of attribution of texts and verification of information, which contributes to the formation of their traditional skills.

5. The increase in the availability of technologies that allow working with different types of images, reflected in the change in the appearance of the project results, in which the share of visual elements has significantly increased. Modern communication practices based on a variety of forms of information exchange, primarily with the use of multimedia texts that combine text, graphics and images, undoubtedly affect the products created by students - collections of poetry.

The results of the project - a corpus of collections prepared by students - reveals the diverse impact of the modernization of the educational field in general and digitalization in particular on the work of students, as well as on the presentation of its results.

References

• Aksenov, S. I., Arifulina, R. U., Katushenko, O. A., Sergeeva T. N., & Romanovskaya, L. V. (2021). Tsifrovaya transformatsiya obrazovatel'nogo prostranstva: novyye instrumenty i tekhnologicheskiye resheniya [Digital transformation of the educational space: new tools and technological solutions]. Perspektivy nauki i obrazovaniya [Perspectives of Science and Education], 1(49), 24-43.

  Google Scholar

  Crossref

• Andryukhina, L. M., Sadovnikova, N. O., Utkina, S. N., & Mirzaakhmedov, A. M. (2020). Tsifrovizatsiya professional'nogo obrazovaniya: perspektivy i nezrimyye bar'yery [Digitalization of vocational education: prospects and invisible barriers]. Obrazovaniye i nauka [Education and Science Journal], 22(3), 116-147. DOI:

  Google Scholar

  Crossref

• Bagdasarova, E. V., & Ilyushchenko, N. S. (2020). Primeneniye metoda teorii resheniya izobretatel'skikh zadach v professional'noy podgotovke lingvistov-perevodchikov [Application of the method of the theory of inventive problem solving in the professional training of linguists-translators]. Perspektivy nauki i obrazovaniya [Perspectives of Science and Education], 2(44), 110-119. DOI:

  Google Scholar

  Crossref

• Barkovskaya, N. V., Verina, U. Yu., & Gutrina, L. D. (2014). Kniga stikhov kak teoreticheskaya problema [The book of poetry as a theoretical problem]. Philological Class, 1(35), 20-30.

• Belyaeva, L. N. (2015). Setevyye lingvisticheskiye resursy v podgotovke filologa [Network linguistic resources in the preparation of a philologist]. Vestnik Permskogo nacionalʹnogo issledovatelʹskogo politehničeskogo universiteta. Problemy âzykoznaniâ i pedagogiki [PNRPU Linguistics and Pedagogy Bulletin], 4, 36-48.

• Bourdieu, P. (1992). Les règles de l’art: genèse et structure du champ littéraire [Rules of the art: genesis and structure of the literary field]. Seuil.

• Clinton, V. (2019). Reading from paper compared to screens: A systematic review and metaanalysis. Journal of Research in Reading, 42(2), 288-325.

• Danielyan, N. V. (2017). Usileniye roli "zhivogo znaniya" pri perekhode k "obshchestvu znaniy": proyekt ili real'nost' [Strengthening the role of "living knowledge" in the transition to a "knowledge society": project or reality]. Vysshee obrazovanie v Rossii [Higher Education in Russia], 3, 71-77.

• Davis, M. H., Wenhao Wang, Kingston, N. M., Hock, M., Tonks, S. M., & Tiemann, G. (2020). A computer adaptive measure of reading motivation. Journal of Research in Reading, 43(1), November, 434-453. DOI: 10.1111/1467-9817.12318

• Epshtein, M. N. (2016). Ot Znaniya – k Tvorchestvu. Kak Gumanitarnyye Nauki Mogut Izmenyat' Mir [From knowledge to creativity. How the Humanities Can Change the World]. Tsentr gumanitarnykh initsiativ.

• Gerasimova, A. V. (2018). Ob odnoy spetsificheskoy praktike: otzyvy na knigi v Internete [The process of reading in the Internet as a special way of reading]. Monitoring Obshchestvennogo Mneniya: Ekonomicheskie i Sotsial'nye Peremeny [Monitoring of Public Opinion: Economic and Social Changes], 1, 222-234.

  Google Scholar

  Crossref

• Huiwen Gao (2021). The status quo of online and offline moral education classroom barriers and connecting paths. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 53. DOI:

  Google Scholar

  Crossref

• Miall, D. S., & Dobson, T. (2001). Reading hypertext and the experience of literature. Journal of Digital Information, 2(1), 1-20.

• Michael, A., Peters, E., White, J., Besley, T., Locke, K., Redder, B., & Novak, R. (2021). Video ethics in educational research involving children: Literature review and critical discussion. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 53(1), 1-18. DOI:

  Google Scholar

  Crossref

• Mishatina, N. L. (2019). Uchebnyy kontseptuariy kul'tury v gorizonte Novogo Entsiklopedizma [The educational concept of culture in the horizon of the New Encyclopedic Approach]. Perspektivy nauki i obrazovaniya [Perspectives of Science and Education], 5(41), 47-62. DOI:

  Google Scholar

  Crossref

• Polat, E. S. (2009). Novyye Pedagogicheskiye i Informatsionnyye Tekhnologii v Sisteme Obrazovaniya [New pedagogical and information technologies in the education system]. Academia.

• Prodanik, N. V. (2020). Fenomen chteniya v russkoy literature i kul'ture of 1800-1830 i metafory "kniga- drug", "kniga-sobesednik" [The phenomenon of reading in Russian literature and culture in the 1800s-1830s and metaphors "book-friend", "book-interlocutor"]. Tekst, Kniga, Knigoizdaniye [Text. Book. Publishing], 22, 58-71.

• Sardoč, M., & Deželan, T. (2021). Talents and distributive justice: some tensions Educational Philosophy and Theory, 53(8), 768-776. DOI:

  Google Scholar

  Crossref

• Singer, L. M., & Alexander, P. A. (2017). Reading on paper and digitally: What the past decades of empirical research reveal. Review of Educational Research, 87(6), 1007-1041.

• Starchikova, I. Yu., Shakurova, E. S., & Moschenok, G. B. (2018). Proyektnaya deyatel'nost' kak innovatsionnaya sostavlyayushchaya v gumanitarnom bloke obrazovatel'nogo protsessa tekhnicheskogo vuza [Project activity as an innovative component in the humanitarian block of the educational process of a technical university]. Perspektivy nauki i obrazovaniya [Perspectives of Science and Education], 4(34), 52-57.

• Tyupa, V. I., & Sergeeva (Noskova), V. B. (2014). Innovatsionnaya tekhnologiya literaturnogo obrazovaniya shkol'nikov: sistemno-deyatel'nostnyy podkhod (stat'ya vtoraya) [Innovative technology of literary education for schoolchildren: a system-activity approach (article two)]. Filologicheskiy klass [Philological Class], 2, 21-26.

• Yakovleva, N. F. (2014). Proyektnaya Deyatel'nost' v Obrazovatel'nom Uchrezhdenii [Project activities in an educational institution]. Flinta.