Organization of value-oriented socially significant project activity as a pedagogical condition for the positive socialization of modern adolescents

Abstract

Adolescence forms a critical node of socialization in which stable value orientations and modes of interaction between the individual and society take shape; nevertheless, mainstream educational practice still reduces project activity to a research format, leaving its value and social dimension on the periphery. The discrepancy between the normative requirement to organize personally significant and socially acceptable activity, enshrined in the Federal State Educational Standard of basic general education, and the predominance of imitative projects detached from the real social context constitutes the studied contradiction. The aim is to determine the pedagogical conditions under which value-oriented socially significant project activity operates as a mechanism of the positive socialization of an adolescent. The study relies on structural-functional and conceptual-category analysis, the modelling method, and content analysis of the educational regulatory framework. An author's model is built, comprising value-semantic, subject-activity, event-community, and reflexive-evaluative components, for each of which pedagogical functions and enabling conditions are defined. Positive socialization is achieved not by increasing the number of projects but by conjoining three vectors – the appropriation of value, the acquisition of a subject position, and inclusion in an adolescent-adult community; the absence of any of them turns the project into a formal event. Shifting the focus of project work from the product to the value-semantic self-determination of the participant changes the interpretation of the result: the socializing effect is rooted in the structure of joint action and its event density.