Professional Network Community for Training Youth Workers: Conceptual Framework and Prerequisites for the Creation

Currently, in the context of the transition to hybrid education, new network forms of communication and interaction of teachers, students as well as specialists are in demand in the framework of personnel training, research and professional activities. The article reveals the main aspects of the integrated network community for training professionals working with youth in the field of educational and youth social policy. Network community can be viewed as an important resource for the development of both the participants themselves and the specific professional sphere. The purpose of the article is to describe the conceptual framework of a professional network community for training personnel for working with youth in the context of social, educational and youth policy and identify the prerequisites for its creation.In the course of the work, we used such methods as structural and functional analysis, system synthesis, modeling and an online survey. The sample comprised university students, faculty members, and youth workers (n = 147) from six federal districts of Russia.The conceptual framework of the professional network community presented on the basis of systemic-synergetic and constructive methodological approaches enables 1) to formulate its idea as a collaboration for personnel training, scientific research, joint projects implementation and self-development of participants; 2) to identify systemic contradictions, the solution of which is directed by the interaction of community members; 3) to determine the axiological basis, purpose, objectives and stages of deployment; 4) to identify the degree of its relevance, the presence of common interests among all its participants on the basis of the results of empirical research that may be useful in the professional network communities design.

The Effect of Soft Skills on the Successful Employment of Future Engineers: Self-Evaluation Results

The research focuses on “integrating” technological universities’ graduates in the current labor market. In pedagogical practice, it is widely known that university graduates with welldeveloped “soft” skills feel more confident about their future, and they can more easily cope with job search. In order to identify the effect of “soft” skills on the readiness of future engineers to job search, a survey was conducted among 106 students, including programmers, business analysts, IT designers, materials scientists, and nanotechnologists.The authors used the statistical methods to identify the relationship between students’ self-evaluation of “soft” skills and their readiness for job-seeking. We have found that 71.7% of all respondents who determined a high level of proficiency in “soft” skills, only 29.6% are confident that job search should not cause difficulties, 28.8% can see a clear connection between their studies and future profession, and 37% believe that they have motivation for professional fulfillment.The results of the survey based on self-evaluation showed that in spite of having a high score in evaluating their “soft” skills, the respondents express extreme uncertainty that they will be competitive enough outside the university and that will be prepared to apply the skills which are crucial for successful employment.

Specifying Learners’ Professional Needs in Academic Writing

The article examines the controversial procedure of analyzing the learner’s professional needs. Needs analysis is generally regarded as an invaluable tool for constructing a course syllabus. It might be really informative if the target situation analysis and present situation analysis are combined. Speaking about academic writing teaching for Russian non-academic students at the Bachelor Degree level, one should admit that students have no or limited experience of functioning in an academic area in English. Consequently, their responses to the questionnaires as one of the frequently used methods of target situation analysis are merely assumptions; and the answers could not be taken as objective and valid. The author presents a system of analyzing students’ needs within the framework of Academic Writing course: namely, distinguishes the stages that precede or follow teacher-student talks about their expectations, provides more objective practice of examining learners’ needs, and discusses ways of improving question-answer sessions/ interviews. Needs analysis practice that develops learners’ professional needs involves task-based learning, reflexive activities, and teaching to ask good questions. Bringing into life the analogy between customer development theory in management and needs analysis practice in education, it is possible to work out a fruitful strategy. Conducting needs analysis pertains equally to specifying and developing students’ needs in academic communication.

Determinants of Trust in Higher Education

The article addresses the factors that influence students’ trust in the teachers, faculty administration and university administration. Establishing trusting relationships at the university leads to a number of positive effects: for example, it facilitates cooperation between members of educational organization, making them more united, open to communication and motivated; it is a prerequisite for academic excellence, high-quality higher education and loyalty. This is the reason of the researchers’ interest to this topic. However, the factors influencing students’ trust in teachers and university management have yet to be defined. This paper examines the individual, socio-economic and institutional characteristics of student trust. The emphasis is placed on subjective factors – the perception and assessment by young people of what happens with them in the learning process. It is shown that students’ trust in the teachers and university management is positively correlated with their justified expectations (satisfaction), regarding higher education, and negatively correlated with the course of study. The influence of gender is significant when students trust in the administration of the faculty, while the influence of family income is significant when they trust in the administration of the university. Moreover, the last two factors are regionally specific: their effects are significant only for the trust of students studying at Moscow and St. Petersburg universities.

Academic Writing for Publication Purposes and Machine Translation: Is the Symbiosis Possible?

The abstracts in Russian and in English are written according to certain rules. For articles written in Russian, an abstract in English is the only means of informing the world scientific community about the authors’ research results. However, the quality of abstracts written in Russian and then translated into English does not always meet the criteria for readability and comply with the accepted academic and publication conventions. This situation might result from the intensive usage of machine translation (MT) systems by authors who do not take into account the guidelines for the input text quality and the limitations inherent in MT systems. The author analyzed the requirements for the input texts and some typical errors in the target ones. The article describes the stages of training masters, postgraduate students and university staff in the effective use of MT systems. The training is based on a bilingual approach, which implies a constant comparison of vocabulary, grammar and style in the native and English languages. The author comes to the conclusion that the effective use of MT systems for writing an abstract in English is possible if the authors have the command of Russian and English at the level sufficient for a concise and unambiguous expression of their thoughts and ideas. Self-censoring is a prerequisite for creating a text that is “understandable” for MT systems. Students must follow simple rules: write sentences of 15-20 words; express one thought per one sentence; use more active verbs; choose nouns that express a specific concept; exclude unnecessary words. At the post-editing stage, learners can use the tools available on the Internet, which allow not only editing the target text, but also will enable learners to acquire independent editing skills.

Regional Development: New Challenges for Engineering Education (SYNERGY-2021 Conference Results Review)

The article summarizes the results of the plenary session of the international network conference “Regional development: new challenges for engineering education – SYNERGY-2021”, held at Kazan National Research Technological University from October 19 to 20, 2021. The forum which brought together representatives of universities and industrial enterprises of Russia and abroad was devoted to the issue of training engineers for the petrochemical industry. Among the participants were representatives of international societies for engineering education, ten national research universities and seven supporting universities of PJSC Gazprom, state authorities and industrial enterprises of Tatarstan. It was possible to observe the work of the plenary session in real time via the Internet in all the supporting universities of Gazprom. The event was organized by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation, the International Society for Engineering Pedagogy (IGIP), the Association of Engineering Education of Russia (AIOR), as well as the Ministry of Industry and Trade of the Republic of Tatarstan and Kazan National Research Technological University. Gazprom PJSC became the general sponsor. In total, the conference gathered more than 450 participants (380 online and 85 in person) from 40 universities in Russia, the USA, Great Britain, Germany, Portugal, Finland, Poland, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Armenia, Latvia, and Estonia. Representatives of 7 industrial enterprises spoke, 77 reports were made.

Student’s Learning Profile as a Tool of Personal Learning Logistics

Increase of complexity and uncertainty as well as demand for personalization (including in education) urges universities to pay attention to educational subjectivity and its development; to transfer towards individual / collective-individual educational navigation and flexible systems of educational programs management (including formation of temporary learning groups, supply of required educational resources in due time, protocols of appraisal and mutual offset of educational results), what determines the relevance of the research. Usage of logistic approach enables to distinguish the pedagogical and management objectives of educational activity organization as well as to facilitate personalization of education. The article considers an educational profile as an instrument of personal educational logistics in digital educational environment, presents the preliminary terms “digital track”, “portfolio”, “profile”. The authors also dwell on the requirements to educational profiles development and scenarios of handling them in digital educational environment taking into account domestic and global experience of educational profiles’ implementation.

The Story of Writing: From Classical Rhetoric to Rhetoric and Composition

Written to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the rubric “Academic Writing and Research Competences” established by the journal’s late editor-in-chief Mikhail Sapunov, the paper focuses on the origins of academic writing and traces its development in terms of rhetoric. The five stages of classical rhetoric are interpreted as five key components of academic writing: research, logic, culture, knowledge, and language. This approach helps visualize academic writing as a wholesome model composed of cognitive and linguistic elements, describe the impact of this model on the rhetorical and publishing conventions of the global academic discourse, and define the problems in knowledge construction as deviations from the model’s unity in various sociocultural contexts. The study concludes that the low quality of an academic text may result from either losing the predominance of the first two stages of rhetoric (invention and arrangement) or of the other three (style, memory, and delivery). The former signifies an ideological pressure on researchers to substitute their own rhetoric with quotes from canonized sources, whereas the latter provokes them to disregard language and style as inferior to research, because of which texts diminish in clarity. In either case, communication lacks in efficiency. The study of academic writing in the historical perspective contributes to better understanding of the latest trends in its development and elicits the problems which impede the quality of Russian scholarly and academic texts.

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.

Subjectivity Formation of a Technical University Master’s Student: A New Challenge for Engineering Education

An important condition for the digital transformation of education is the subjectivity of students and teachers. The formation of subjectivity as the ability to set one’s own goals and change either oneself or the educational environment to achieve them raises a number of questions: what is meant by the subjectivity of a student and a teacher, what does it mean to be a subject of the educational process, which factors contribute to and which hinder the formation of subjectivity. The authors focus on the conditions that promote and prevent the formation of subjectivity in master’s education of future engineers. Based on a review of foreign and domestic approaches to understanding subjectivity and the conditions for its development, it is concluded that all researchers distinguish similar aspects and manifestations in subjectivity: motivational (intrinsic motivation), emotional-valuable (proactive and responsible attitude to life), regulatory (the ability to set goals and follow them through to the end), cognitive (desire and ability to apply knowledge) and practical (skills, experience of independent activity). It has been established that foreign studies more often consider subjectivity as a resource, which improves the quality of education, while Russian studies consider it as a goal and a result of education. The article describes a taxonomy of subjectivity, which allows to measure it as an educational result. Based on the analysis of necessary and sufficient conditions for subjectivity formation, the hypothesis is made that the sufficient condition for subjectivity formation in mastering the “pedagogics” discipline is stepwise equitable partnership between all subjects of educational process. The condition is specified as a sequence of actions of a teacher and a master’s student in the process of mastering the discipline. The article describes the results of a pedagogical experiment in a group of master’s students of PNRPU Faculty of Civil Engineering, aimed at testing the proposed conditions. The results obtained show that step-bystep organized peer-to-peer interaction enabled most students in the experimental group to achieve the subjectivity level by the end of the discipline, while in the control group most students reached only the objectivity level. The motivational and practical aspects of subjectivity changed most significantly in the experimental group.