Humanitarian aspects of teaching the discipline «History of Russia» at a technical university

Abstract

The introduction of a unified content for the History of Russia course in non-historical fields of study has shifted the focus from whether the discipline should be present to how it should be taught within an engineering environment dominated by an instrumental and pragmatic attitude of students. The aim of the work is to determine the set of humanitarian aspects of the discipline and to match them with pedagogical means suitable for a technical university. Structural-functional and conceptual-categorial analysis, comparison of approaches, content analysis of regulatory documents and modelling of didactic schemes for integrating historical content into engineering training were applied. Six humanitarian aspects are identified – worldview-value, historical-cultural, communicative-speech, critical-analytical, civic-identification and professional-ethical – and for each one forms of academic work are selected that are consistent with the requirement of at least 80 percent of contact load. A comparison of specialized and engineering-technical training showed that the latter is characterized by a shift of the leading function of the discipline from the informational-knowledge function to the value-semantic one, whereas the existing practice retains the opposite ratio. Four models of integrating historical material are proposed, differing in the principle of construction and the condition of effectiveness. The discrepancy between the normatively defined educational function of the course and the actually reproduced knowledge-reproductive practice means that the effectiveness of teaching history at a technical university is determined not by the volume of factual material, but by the choice of a didactic model that retains the value-semantic core of the discipline.