A Sociocultural Approach to Children’s Visual Creations

This chapter locates the book within the research on children’s art. It explores interpretations of children’s visual creations throughout the twentieth century and situates the approach of the book within the research landscape. The authors take developmental psychological, educational, and aesthetic approaches to form a sociocultural view of children’s art, challenging many of the previous research assumptions. Through adopting the paradigm of the sociocultural approach, the authors embrace its view of children as competent cultural actors and active participants in cultural production. Thus, the discussion focuses on meaning-making: the authors analyze visual artifacts made by students to understand how they engage with the idea of the difference.

Pela Gandong for Social Reconciliation and Peacebuilding in Ambon

This study aimed to explore the effectiveness of Pela Gandong in the process of social reconciliation and peacebuilding in Ambon. Using a sociocultural approach, this qualitative research attempted to examine the theory of social reconciliation in the peace-building process between two conflicting groups. The data that had been collected in the form of interviews, FGDs, and documentation sources related to pela gandong were qualitatively analyzed. The results of the research showed that structural segregation becomes a barrier to the process of social reconciliation because some communities and local elites still maintained inter-group beliefs about the existence of a common enemy due to past conflicts. Pela gandong played a role in strengthening social reconciliation amid actor antagonisms that were difficult to subside, factions among local elites that were still strong, and people who were still trapped in past traumas. Based on the spirit of pela gandong, the government and civil society, including educational institutions in Ambon, presented a peaceful atmosphere with various initiatives, starting from the formation of multi-ethnic villages, providing facilities and infrastructure for harmony, strengthening the curriculum for local wisdom "Pela Gandong" and “Pendidikan Orang Basudara” (POB), to strengthening interfaith mediation institutions in Maluku: Baku Bae, Maluku Interfaith Institution, and Maluku Interfaith Institution for Humanitarian Action. All of them were an effort to create a peaceful Ambon, make Maluku a laboratory for peace, a learning medium for other regions in Indonesia.

SOCIOCULTURAL COMPONENT OF THE CONTENT OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEXTBOOKS FOR TECHNICAL UNIVERSITIES

Ориентация стандартов высшего технического образования на развитие у студентов универсальных компетенций в категориях «Коммуникация» и «Межкультурное взаимодействие» и одновременно превалирование в иноязычной подготовке будущих инженеров направленности на коммуникацию в социально-бытовой и профессиональной сферах требуют применения в обучении иностранным языкам в технических вузах элементов социокультурного подхода. Данный подход полноценно разработан в научных исследованиях, однако проблемы его реализации в учебниках для технических вузов остаются актуальными. Проанализировано содержание отечественных и зарубежных учебников по иностранным языкам для технических вузов, изданных в текущем столетии, на предмет социокультурного компонента их содержания. Полученные результаты могут быть значимы для разработчиков соответствующих вузовских учебников, преподавателей иностранных языков. The current standards of higher technical education provide for the development of universal competencies of students (groups of competencies “Communication”, “Intercultural interaction”), which should be implemented within the framework of the study of the discipline “Foreign language” and, accordingly, reflected in the content of educational support. As a few decades ago, and today, future engineers and university teachers of foreign languages recognize the inadequacy of teaching foreign language communication only in everyday and professional spheres. The sociocultural approach in foreign language teaching is well characterized in scientific research, and the content of most contemporary school textbooks on foreign languages is saturated with relevant topics and language material. At the same time, the problems of implementing this approach in the content of textbooks for universities, especially technical ones, remain relevant and insufficiently studied. The purpose of the study is to compare, analyze the content of domestic and foreign (authentic) university textbooks in English and German for students of technical universities, published in the current century, for the socio-cultural component of their content (topics, speech material, sociocultural commentary, etc.). In total, the author of the article analyzed 40 textbooks of this direction. The results obtained can be taken into account by the developers of the corresponding university educational literature, teachers of foreign languages of technical universities.

Female images in Art Nouveau style

This article analyzes the activity of the Art Nouveau artists of the late XIX – early XX centuries, and the reception of their works. The subject of this research is the works of both female and male artists, and their interinfluence. The article touches upon the topic of genders in art, difficulties of promoting the “female perspective” in the period of Art Nouveau. The article employs the comparative-historical, involving scientific materials on culturology, philosophy and art history; sociocultural approach towards historical events in the establishment of Art Nouveau. The relevance of this topic is substantiated by heightened interest to studying the phenomenon of Art Nouveau and the role of women in its formation. The novelty of this research consists in attempt to determine the specificity of female principle in Art Nouveau style, both as an artistic image that holds the leading place therein, and in the image of women artists who tried to implement their vision of female image in the art object. The conclusion is made that despite the shift in the worldview orientations and artistic paradigms of this period, women artists were experiencing major difficulties. The formation of the Art Nouveau style vividly manifested the features of the “new woman” in the works of women artists, emphasizing their uniqueness and artistic peculiarities. It is determined that the comprehension of multifacetedness of Art Nouveau style was greatly affected by women artists, whose works are still relevant today.

SOCIOCULTURAL METHODOLOGY AS A THEORETICAL BASIS ANALYSIS OF THE TRANSFORMATION OF MODERN SOCIETY

This article attempts to explicate the socio-cultural aspect as a general methodological tool that will allow making an integral analysis of modern society. The possibility of using the methodological potential of the sociocultural approach to analyze the process of change in modern society, which is increasingly called informational and communicative, is considered. This concept of the information society functions and creates social ideals and values ​​that are widely discussed in the social and human sciences within the framework of a social and cultural approach. Analysis of the information society is a multidisciplinary field of research, and sociocultural analysis is designed to answer important questions: in what direction and for what purpose is the social situation developing and what is the axiological component of this process? The synthesizing nature of the sociocultural analysis of the information society shows the direction of predicting its subsequent advance, the search for new normative concepts that suggest the possibility of localizing this process in a socially desirable channel, while ignoring both excessive optimism and extreme pessimism.

The problem of optimal selection of methods for studying everyday legal awareness in the Russian folk tales

This article is dedicated to problem of optimal selection of methods for studying everyday legal awareness in the Russian folk tales. Attention is turned to the complexity of such choice due to intricacy of the empirical base. The article provides an overview of the study of Russian folk tales by the representatives of various sciences: philology, folklore studies, philosophy, culturology, and psychology. The author believes that the methods of analysis (criticism) of the written sources, generalization, comparison, and specific historical methods are optimal on the empirical stage of research. On the theoretical stage, these are the methods of abstraction, analysis, system-structural method, induction, deduction, sociocultural approach. Hermeneutical and phenomenological methods rather carry significant risks. The author demonstrates the advantages of “morphological analysis” of tales proposed by V. Y. Propp. The author outlines the result of studying the legal phenomena in the Russian folk tales, namely acquisition of objective, reliable and scientifically proven knowledge on the system of natural correlation between the reflection and translation of legal ideas of the early period in the Russian tales, as well as on the inverse determining links between legal ideas of the early period and their reflection in folklore. The article provides the original definition of legal archetype as an element of the collective unconscious, which represents a prototype of the ideas on justice, norm and extent, reward, freedom, property, essence of agreement and its force, power, and judgment. The conclusion is made that the plotline of the Russian folk tales reflect the process of establishment of legal awareness based on individualization of self-consciousness of a person. At the same time, the sociocultural approach towards studying the phenomenon of tales is considered central, since the described in Russian folk tales sociocultural reality is the determinant of the development of law in the objective sense.