Adaptability and Self-Organization of the Doctoral Training System

Training of highly qualified personnel for science, education and industry is an important factor in the formation of a high-tech economy. The modern system of doctoral training does not always cope with its tasks. Enhancing the efficiency of doctoral training can be associated with an increase in adaptability and self-organization. The adaptation of the pedagogical system to changing conditions should be considered in a broad sense, while its fitting to students’ features is a special manifestation of this property. It is necessary to work out two mechanisms of its adaptation – passive and active. Passive adaptation means adjusting to changing external conditions (including a new law), changing in the systems of an adjacent and higher levels. Active adaptation involves the influence on other subsystems of the university educational environment, such as master’s school, additional education (retraining and advanced training of professors), the scientific and pedagogical personnel attestation system (dissertation councils), research departments. Such adaptation can take place according to the model of expanding influence, simultaneously at two levels – personal (subject-subjective) and organizational and managerial. Self-organization is considered as one of the most important features of the system adaptability and a condition for its successful functioning.

European practices for the development of PhD training courses (on the example of personal development course)

В статье представлены результаты применения европейских практик разработки учебных курсов на примере курса личностного развития для аспирантов российских и белорусских университетов. Авторы курса входят в команду международного консорциума вузов по реализации программы Erasmus+ проект MODEST (Modernization of Doctoral Education in Science and Improvement Teaching Methodologies – Модернизация обучения в аспирантуре по естественным наукам и улучшение педагогических методик). Цель разработанного курса: развитие эмоционального интеллекта, а также и эффективных навыков стресс-менеджмента и управления временем. Методологическими основами разработки курса явились теория результатов обучения Д.Кеннеди и концепция развития гибких навыков. Разработанная структура, содержание и технология курса проходят апробацию в процессе подготовки аспирантов и молодых исследователей в университетах России и Беларуси. Внедрение курса будет реализованов практике деятельности Doctoral Training Centers – Тренинговых центров для аспирантов, организованных на базе университетов консорциума проекта MODEST программы ERASMUS+ в странах: Россия; Беларусь и Армения. Article presents results of training course design according to European practices by example of a Personal Development course for PhD students of Russian and Belarusian universities. Authors are part of an international consortium of universities team of the Erasmus + MODEST project implementation (Modernization of Doctoral Education in Science and Improvement Teaching Methodologies). Course goal: development of emotional intelligence, as well as effective stress management and time management skills. Methodological foundations of the course development were D. Kennedy's learning outcomes theory and the concept of soft skills development. Structure, content and technology of the course are being tested in the process of training PhD students and young researchers at universities in Russia and Belarus. Introduction of the course is planned in the practice of the Doctoral Training Centers – Training centers for PhD students, organized at the universities of the MODEST project consortium (ERASMUS + program) in the countries: Russia; Belarus and Armenia.

The Training and Disciplinary Identity of Linguists in Europe’s Long Nineteenth Century

In the mid-19th century, the great centers of philological and linguistic study in Europe were a handful of German universities that led the way in organizing doctoral training. In seminars guided by a senior professor, students presented papers on specialized topics and had them critiqued and queried. This chapter takes a close look at the nature of such training in Germany and France through the experience of one Leipzig doctoral student who went on to lecture in Paris and Geneva, Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913). The political and cultural relations between Germany and France in the two decades following the Franco-Prussian War and the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine colored and complicated the importation of the Germany doctoral training model in the various branches of the University of Paris, and not least in the section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études in which Saussure was hired to lecture on Gothic and Old High German, to a student body made up disproportionately of displaced Alsatians. So significant was Saussure’s impact on the institution that his teaching set the agenda for French doctoral training in linguistics and adjacent areas at least through the 1960s, and indeed across Europe and beyond – this despite the fact that he was never in a position to direct a single doctoral thesis himself. The chapter considers as well how the disciplinary identity of linguistics came to be formed in this period, and how it went on to develop over the ensuing decades.