On the Issue of Establishing Public Schools of the Future: A Synthesis of Subject- and Project-Based Education

Abstract

The article argues that the Russian school system is limited in respect of the mastered activity types: children are mostly retelling texts or solving text tasks. At the same time, in China and the EU the polytypic activity is "built in" even in the architectural space of the school. In the school building, there are special areas for different learning activities: one for a usual lesson, another one for performances, and a third one for experiments. The author challenges the idea of the traditional division between school disciplines and project-based learning, the latter being isolated and institutionalized in the form of additional education with no goals to master generalized ways of acting. Project-based learning carries out the function of motivation: by implementing their projects school students begin to understand how to use knowledge in a practical context. Transition from a project plot to implementation is the move from design thinking to action in a situation. Integrating academic curriculum and project-based education is possible on the basis of metasubject approach: such constituents as knowledge, sign (schemes), problem, task, situation, meaning, and goals are used as tools for mastering academic disciplines and developing projects. At the same time, students acquire a special type of reflection of the cognitive and metacognitive processes in solving research and design problems.