Abstract:

The student’s personality development follows the norms, values and ideals of an epoch. The transition to the digital world has led to a change in culture and, therefore, in the idea of education as preparation for the future. Multi-subject school education provides a certain model of the environment for the individual’s interaction with nature and society to take place, thus forming the student’s ability to adapt to a new environment each time when the subject changes. Collective experience of adaptation, success or failure in a particular knowledge area forms an individual experience. This experience makes individuals face the problem of the freedom of choice and forms motives for achievement. Having made their choice, students join their interest groups (on engineering, medicine, art etc.). Within each group, an imprinting mechanism comes into effect that helps improve existing programs and form a model of the future combined with the chosen image of the world (for example, the world of technology). Teenagers, especially talented ones, want to organize their behavior in the chosen world. Then general school education is supplemented with cofigurative learning – an alternative system implemented most often in the technology park and representing project-based learning and other forms of learning in small groups. The objective of this study is to analyze the impact of such a form of cofigurative learning as project work of students in the educational environment of the regional school technology park based at Kuban State Technological University (in the Russian city of Krasnodar). The methodology of this educational research includes observation, conducting interviews and document analysis, as well as the case study method. The results of the study show that the project work in the technology park stimulates the personal development of students as members of creative teams. A small group of like-minded creators forms its own ideals and norms of directed behavior, moves away from the state of equilibrium inherent in multidirectional groups, finds a potential meaning of internal development, begins to strive to use its human potential, and even foresees the meaning of life - particularly in the situation of the constant development of technology. Project-based learning assumes and largely ensures that the schoolchildren who undergo cofigurative learning in the technology park educational environment learn not only from the elders but also from their peers (for example, those who are better informed in the aspects of technology to be used and/or developed), which means that the learning system becomes self-organized. Beside early career guidance, it enables forming creative teams of children and youth that can successfully collaborate and integrate new ideas at the level of a more progressive worldview. As a result, they will be ready to become leaders of technological progress, included into the cultural development of society, as soon as they enter their professions.

Acknowledgement:
The research was carried out with the financial support of the Kuban science Foundation in the framework of the scientific project № IFR 20.1/36.

Keywords:

Technology park, project work, cofigurative learning.