Dmitry Vladomirovich Dolgushin,
Doctor of Philology, Humanities Institute of Novosibirsk State University, Novosibirsk, Russia, e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Cognitive Tasks, Mnemonic Tables and Didactic Games: Approaches to Problem-Based Teaching of History in Russian Pedagogy of the 19th – 21st Centuries
DOI: 10.31518/2618-9100-2021-5-17
The article is devoted to the study of didactic practices used by Russian teachers of the 19th – 21st centuries to implement a problem approach in teaching history. Cognitive tasks are one of the main tools of problem-based history teaching. For the first time they were developed by I.Ya. Lerner. The heyday of the genre occurred in the 1990s. It was then that collections of cognitive tasks on history began to be called “problem books”. The most famous of them were the problem books of S.G. Smirnov, A.T. Stepanishchev and S.G. Goryainov. If the tasks of I.Y. Lerner were distinguished by their binding to a specific educational and methodological context and information minimalism, then the problem books of the 1990s assumed possession of broad historical contexts and the presence of erudition that went beyond the school course. The tasks have become more diverse from a methodological point of view. In the 2000s – 2010s, historical tasks (with a division into cognitive and problematic ones) became a permanent section of basic educational and methodological complexes. History problem books began to be used in universities, and their subjects became more specialized. There were problem books devoted to certain historical periods, certain topics of national and regional history. Published in 2021, the taskbook edited by E.V. Burlutskaya for the first time in the history of the genre turned out to focus not on event history, but on the history of everyday life. However, there is a level of history teaching at which it is impossible to use tasks – this is the level of formation of the initial fund of knowledge. On it, the educational material is assimilated in a “ready-made form”, receptively, through its presentation during explanations by the teacher. In search of ways to implement the problem approach at this level, it will be useful to turn to the legacy of Russian pedagogy of the 19th century, namely to the pedagogical experiments of V.A. Zhukovsky. Organizing the teaching of history to the heir to the throne, and later to his own children, Zhukovsky developed special tables (still unpublished) in which historical material was encoded using a special system of signs. Unlike A.F. Yazvinsky, Zhukovsky managed to combine the clarity of the table and the coherence of the narrative. The encoding and decoding of the text, the folding of the word into a symbol and the unfolding of the symbol into a word formed the essence of his didactic tools and allowed to problematize the material through its form, and not through the content, to set the rules of the didactic game. Zhukovsky’s methodology contains an experience that has not yet been comprehended and mastered by domestic pedagogy, but has great potential for implementing a problem approach at the initial stage of teaching history.
Publishing: 28/10/2021
The article has been received by the editor on 14/06/2021
How to cite: Dolgushin D.V. Cognitive Tasks, Mnemonic Tables and Didactic Games: Approaches to Problem-Based Teaching of History in Russian Pedagogy of the 19th – 21st Centuries // Historical Courier, 2021, No. 5 (19), pp. 203–220. [Available online: http://istkurier.ru/data/2021/ISTKURIER-2021-5-17.pdf]
Links: Issue 5 2021
Keywords: problem approach; problem problems in history; cognitive problems in history; didactics; mnemonics; chronological tables; didactic games; A.F. Yazvinsky; V.A. Zhukovsky
The work was carried out with the financial support of the RFBR (project No. 20-012-00529).