Olga A. Shiyan

Background. The foundation of any preschool educational practice is built upon implicitly embedded assumptions about a child’s psychological characteristics and developmental pathways. This may constitute not a systematic but rather an eclectic set of beliefs with poorly understood foundations; however, for effective practice, education must be grounded in a holistic system of psychological views based on a sound psychological conception. Furthermore, the conception itself, as it evolves, requires continuous reflection on its key tenets, including through the process of their interpretation in various practical implementations. The transfer of a scientific theory into a different cultural and linguistic space is of particular interest for its development. Yet, understanding the specifics of such a transfer necessitates dedicated research methodologies.

Objectives. This paper presents the authors’ original model for analyzing the representation of ideas from Lev Vygotsky’s Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) in scientific discourse and educational practice. The aim of developing this model is to enrich the understanding of CHAT ideas within national preschool education systems by examining how they exist within the context of both the target and the original scientific traditions and educational systems.

Sample. Hong Kong, representing a unique blend of cultural traditions, was selected as the testing ground for the model. Based on developed criteria, a sample of 50 open-access scientific, regulatory, and methodological texts in English by Hong Kong authors was selected.

Methods. The study was conducted through a textual analysis of these documents according to the authors’ model, which implies analyzing the presence of references to the founder of CHAT and his followers, the use of the theory’s key concepts, and the context of their application — whether for scientific discussion or practical development.

Results. The testing of the model demonstrated its applicability for analyzing the representation of CHAT ideas in the scientific discourse and educational practice of Hong Kong. The model allows for tracing the trajectory of Vygotsky’s influence on scientific discourse and educational practice, as well as the connection between scientific discourse and practical application.

Conclusions. The model can be applied to advance preschool education in various countries.

Background. The development of creative thinking is one of the important tasks of early childhood education. It is important to understand the role children’s activities, particularly story-telling, can play in this development. Of particular interest are narrative practices that create a social situation that supports children’s writing.

Objective: to analyze the influence of the narrative practice of “fairy tales with provocations” on the development of creative (dialectical) thinking of older preschoolers and individual parameters of fairy tale stories that children create.

Methods. The study involved 60 children aged 6-7 years. To diagnose creative (dialectical) thinking, the “What can happen at the same time?” (Veraksa N.E.) technique was used; to diagnose creative thinking and the ability to create symbolic images, the “Fire” subtest was used (the “Three Stories” method by Shiyan O.A.). We proposed the narrative practice “Fairy Tales with Provocations” as a way to activate children’s creative thinking.

Results. According to the results of the initial diagnostics, no significant differences were found; the results of the children in the experimental and control groups did not have any of the study parameters. The final diagnostics showed that in the control group no significant positive changes were found compared to the initial diagnosis in any of the studied parameters, while in the experimental group significant positive changes were found at a significant level in everyone according to all measurable parameters: creative (dialectical) thinking, creative transformations and artistic (symbolic) image in narratives, as well as the structure of narratives.

Conclusion. The study showed that the narrative practice “Fairy Tales with Provocations” is an adequate way to develop creative (dialectical) thinking, and also has a positive effect on the stories that children create: they become more complex and structured, they contain more creative transformations and artistic (symbolic) images. All this suggests that such symbolic activities as writing fairy tales are an important space for the development of children’s creativity. The results can be used to build educational work with children based on the resource of children’s activities.

Dialectic cognition allows solving contradictory situations and concludes in application of special dialectic cognitive actions. It lies within preschooler’s zone of proximal development, i.e. is available for all children. However, only few children develop dialectic cognition when educated traditionally. This claim doesn’t refer only to creative thinking: it is an experimentally proven fact that higher forms of play, orientation, learning skills or moral development don’t necessarily develop in all children, unless they are taught by special educational programs. The author analyzes stages of solving a dialectic task, like posing a dialectic question, living through contradictions, dialectic transformation and other tasks, applicably to designing studies for preschoolers.

Development of creative thinking is one of the major goals of preschool education, achievement of which largely depends on teachers and their abilities to set proper tasks for children and arrange their realization. The important part of this work is an ability to conduct classes in accordance with children’s answers, which requires good level of self-reflection – awareness of successful and unsuccessful interventional actions. And taking special notes of them is one of the most efficient ways to develop such ability. The article provides with an example of reflection notes taken during physics class with senior preschoolers. Besides the documentary part of the notes where the actions taken are depicted, the notes include commentaries of the conducting teacher and of the scientific supervisor of the project.

Development of creative thinking is one of the major goals of preschool education, achievement of which largely depends on teachers and their abilities to set proper tasks for children and arrange their realization. The important part of this work is an ability to conduct classes in accordance with children’s answers, which requires good level of self-reflection – awareness of successful and unsuccessful interventional actions. And taking special notes of them is one of the most efficient ways to develop such ability. The article provides with an example of reflection notes taken during physics class with senior preschoolers. Children retell the fairy-tale on behalf of different characters. Besides the documentary part of the notes where the actions taken are depicted, the notes include commentaries of the conducting teacher and of the scientific supervisor of the project.

In the article current trends of development of early years education are analyzed. Special attention is paid to trends that appeared in accordance with ideas of Lev Vygotsky: to combine non-directive interaction between adult and child and to stimulate child development. The article describes modern tools of evaluation of the educational environment that supports this educational model. Educational standards are the institutional mechanism of quality support of preschool education. Particular attention is paid to American and German approach to assessment of the quality of preschool education. Based on the analysis of systems of these countries author identifies some of the universal trends of preschool education: change of vision of quality of early childhood education, which can be labeled as a “paradigm shift from a paradigm of Piaget to paradigm of Vygotsky” and the creation of an independent system of accreditation of educational programs.

The article describes the tasks aimed at the development of cyclic representations of the older preschoolers. In each case, the description is given by a single scheme: formulation of the problem, a description of a specific task, an example of how children cope with this task. Objectives for action of dialectical transformation are proposed: children learn to establish relationships between opposites, detect transformation of objects and phenomena within the daily cycle (during the transition from day to night and vice versa). The authors show how to build a dialogue with the child in the course of solving problems and how to stimulate children’s thinking. The main goal is to create a situation in which children can discover the cyclic structure in the world, solving all sorts of problems in the course of the discussion, the project activity or writings stories.

The article is devoted to the following question: how do children of the senior preschool age reflect the processes of development in the world. Cyclic representations, allowing the child to reflect the structure of the development (the transformation of the object into its opposite and return to the starting point, but at a new stage) are understood as means of reflection of developmental processes. Cyclic representations allow the child to see patterns of the processes occurring around him repeatability, to see the nonrandomness of a sequence of events. The paper describes the results of studies of cyclic representations of older preschoolers on the examples of making stories and solving problems. These studies show that, although the children are immersed in the cyclical processes of the world, presentation of these processes to the children is fragmented as they are not organized into a coherent structure.

The article describes the tools used to measure preschool educational environment – the ECERS Scales (Early Childhood Environment Rating Scales). The authors address the following questions: What are the ideas of quality education underpinning the ECERS Scales, and Are they suitable to us? Is it generally acceptable to use tools developed in another country to assess education quality in your own? Does the scale measure conditions for the child’s future socialization and development at school? How does it work, what are its parameters for measuring quality? How reliable is it? Can this tool be used in different educational practices (e.g. the Montessori system, Waldorf kindergartens, etc.)? Or does it focus solely on specific program? It is noted that the fact that the ECERS scale is used in countries focused on child’s cognitive development is of great importance for Russian education, which has traditionally placed high value on “school readiness”. The authors come to the conclusion that the ECERS Scales fully meet the Federal State Educational Standard requirements and possess distinctiveness and therefore can be used to assess the quality of education in Russian preschool children. The ECERS Scales are highly promising in cross-cultural research that compares the quality of Russian and foreign pre-school education.

The article is devoted to the following question: how children of preschool age reflect developments in the surrounding world. Cyclic representations are understood as means of representation, which allow the child to reflect the structure of development: the transformation of the object into its opposite and return to the starting point, but at a new stage. Cyclic representations allow the child to see patterns recurrence occurring of the processes, to see non-randomness in the sequence of events. This article describes the tasks aimed at the formation of cyclic representations of the older preschoolers. Examples of specific tasks, “traps” that define the problem situations, as well as the cases in which children solve the problem situations are presented. Testing of tasks was carried out in 2013-2014 in preschool establishments of Moscow №1602 and №2523.

The article describes the theoretical foundations of the educational project “Transformation” project aimed at developing dialectical thinking in preschoolers and based on the “child’s participation principle” in the educational process. Dialectical thinking is understood to mean productive handling of the opposites which allows a person, on the one hand, to understand the world in the making, and, on the other, to produce a new creative product. This article describes the key points of the project: the dialectical structure of the developing world as an educational content, a dialectical task and the child participation principle. The author considers the specifics of implementing the “child’s participation principle” in the Transformation project: a child’s acquisition of cognitive means necessary for him to comprehend the development processes and, in particular, those in his own life when forecasting, planning and reflecting.

This article examines the relationship between different aspects of cognitive development: formal-logical thinking, dialectical thinking, imagination, and cyclic representations. The findings of their research allow the authors to claim that there are two pairs of relationships which can conditionally be called the “standard cluster” (cyclic representations and formal-logical thinking) and the “cluster of transformation” (the action of mediation and image activation within the imagination). This means that the understanding of the world around us and the creation of something new turn out to be not alternatives, but mutually reinforcing tasks. Dialectical thinking acts as a psychological mechanism for understanding consistent patterns and the creation of new things. The article concludes that developmental processes should be the most essential part of education. Creative thinking will develop provided that the processes of development are given to children as a problem that must be solved and not as information that must be learned. Consequently, children will simultaneously comprehend the world around them and learn to create something within it.

This article presents the findings of research on the quality of early childhood education and care in Moscow. This research is based on insight into the quality of early childhood education and care built in to The Federal State Educational Standard for Preschool Education and the cultural-historical ideas of L. Vygotsky. The main aim of this field research is to investigate “the strong points” and drawbacks of early childhood education and care in the capital city. The Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale (ECERS-R) is used as an instrument of field research. The results are based on a random sample of 36 preschools and kindergartens in one of the districts of Moscow. The research gathers data about the most comfortable and least comfortable aspects of the learning environment in the preschools and kindergartens of Moscow. Taking into consideration the requirements of the Federal State Educational Standards, the findings of the research revealed that the most important line of learning environment development in preschool and kindergarten are individual early care and education program, support for the independence of children, the creation of a more available and mobile environment, and optimal conditions for the development of thinking, imagination and child creativity.

Goal-setting. The paper focuses on narrative abilities of preschool children as a resource for their cognitive development. Considering the speech and language development by children applies Lev Vygotsky’s cultural-historical approach. The development is viewed as a dialectical process: development is considered not as a gradual growth, but as a series of qualitative transformations. The study emphasizes two statements from Lev Vygotsky’s analysis: first, the idea of the genetic connection of telling (and drawing) stories with the future learning of reading and writing; second, the idea of connection between figurative and verbal means of creating narratives at the preschool age. Lev Vygotsky’s ideas were considered in relation with current studies on children’s narrative abilities.

Procedure and Methods. The paper describes the study on connection between the structure of children’s narratives and the dialectical thinking of preschoolers.

Applied methods: “What can be at the same time?” (N.Veraksa); “What can be the other way round?)” (A. Belolutskaya); “Children’s test of cyclic representations” (N. Veraksa, S. Senyukova), “Tell a story” (A. Mak Keib). The study involved 34 children aged from five years to six years and eleven months. Each child was studied individually to avoid the influence of other children on the content of the story. A study on the method “Compilation of history using a dialectical pattern” (I. B. Shiyan) involving 44 senior preschool children (5 – 6.5 years of age) has been conducted. Children were asked to invent their own story (based on imagination or describing real events that happened to the child) using a dialectical pattern (beginning, middle, end) or without using one.

Results and Conclusion. The connection with the success of dialectical approach was detected only for stories based on the pattern. The study came to conclusion that using the “beginning, end, middle” storytelling pattern encourages children to create a more complex narrative, including operating with opposites. The creation of narratives can be used as a resource of cognitive development, in particular development of dialectical thinking in senior preschool children.

One of the major challenges of the mainstream professional development programs is their focus on mastering individual knowledge and technologies instead of creating conditions for the development of teachers themselves. In particular, instead of their critical thinking and reflection, while it is reflexion that allows teachers to qualitatively change the educational process, while keeping in focus both children’s interests and abilities and cultural development objectives. This article addresses approaches to the understanding of self-reflexion and proposes a model of self-reflexive professional action. The authors, following the logic of the cultural-historical approach by Lev Vygotsky, Daniil Elkonin and Georgy Shchedrovitsky, consider the visual model of the results of children’s development, the visual model of professional action, the model of self-reflexive solution, the positions of the “defender”, the “critique” and the “voice of the child” as the means for the development of self-reflexion. The use of these tools became the basis for a specially developed program of professional development for early childhood teachers, in which teachers are offered the following tasks: immersion in children’s activities, analysis of video of both own and others’ practices, and the creation of “Navigators”. The article also presents such a tool for studying reflexive observation as a “Professional Eyewear”, which allows to evaluate such aspects of self-reflexive action as the ability to orientate oneself to the tasks of children’s development, the ability to observe children and the ability to see the causal connection between the actions of a teacher and the behavior and emotions of children. The annex to the article formulates the main stages and principles of building a program aimed at the development of self-reflection among teachers.

The relevance of the topic of the article. For the wide educational practice of kindergartens, the question of the psychological mechanisms of creative thinking is fundamental, since their formation begins precisely at the age of three to five years. If during this period of a person’s life the educational process is structured in such a way that the child’s creative thinking is not supported or even suppressed, then it will be very difficult, and sometimes impossible, to compensate for gaps in cognitive development at later life stages. It should be emphasized that, as a rule, teachers do not support creative thinking or even act to the detriment of it precisely because of a lack of understanding of the key principles of its development, which, in particular, are related to ensuring a balance of activities that actualize formal-logical, dialectical and symbolic structures of thinking.

The aim of the study. The work is aimed at identifying the features of the structure of cognitive abilities that make up the complex mechanism of creative thinking, which is one of the basic problems of psychology of cognitive development today. The question is posed of how dialectical thinking, formal logic and the ability to symbolize are related in preschool age. The assumption is verified that the use of Piaget’s tools, focused on fixing reversibility relations and the formation of the phenomenon of preservation, will reveal new aspects of the relationship between formal-logical and dialectical thought structures.

Description of the research progress. 272 preschoolers from Moscow and other regions of the Russian Federation were individually diagnosed. For data processing, methods of correlation analysis and verification of the independence of parameters according to the Pearson’s chi-squared criterion were applied.

Research results. The results of the study showed that the connection between the three lines of cognitive development of preschoolers is traced more consistently in relation to formal and dialectical thinking. With regard to symbolization, the connections are less consistent. The article concludes that normative, transformative and symbolic abilities are relatively independent lines in the cognitive development of preschoolers.

Conclusion. The data obtained indicate the complexity and heterogeneity of the mechanism of creative thinking and the heterogeneous structure of relationships between formal-logical and dialectical structures, as well as the ability to symbolize. Therefore, the program for the development of creative thinking for preschoolers should have a balanced character: by influencing one type of structures, we cannot expect that the rest will also develop as a result of this influence. To actualize the complex mechanism of a child’s creative thinking in the pedagogical terms, it is necessary to design problem situations together with the children, the resolution of which requires both the use of formal and dialectical logic and the ability to invent symbols, images, metaphors.

Relevance (context) of the subject of the article. The problem of creative abilities is becoming increasingly important in two contexts at once – both in the context of human self-realization, and in the context of the development of practices and production. A special place is occupied by the development of creative abilities in preschool age: even in the works of Lev Vygotsky, it was said about the importance of considering the germs of creativity in the game and fantasy of children. Today, within the framework of the cultural-historical approach, there are a number of scientific schools that study the possibilities of diagnosing and developing children’s creativity.

The aim of the study is to analyze the approaches to the study of children’s creativity in cultural-historical psychology in order to understand what answers to the questions posed by Lev Vygotsky, were discovered over the past decades, and what remained unanswered. It is also important to see how the questions themselves were transformed, since the raising of a new question is a sign of the development of science. The correlation of existing approaches is important for the development of new research programs in the logic of cultural-historical psychology.

Description of the research. The article analyzes various approaches to the research and development of creative abilities: V.V. Davydov and V.T. Kudryavtsev, D.B. Bogoyavlenskaya, N.E. Veraksa and O.M. Dyachenko, V.N. Druzhinin, L.F. Obukhova. The general and specific characteristics of the interpretation of children’s creativity in different approaches of the cultural and historical tradition are highlighted. The conducted research correlates with the questions about the creative nature of the human psyche and about children’s creativity, posed by L.S.Vygotsky.

Research results. The article concludes that despite all the differences in the approaches that have appeared in the logic of the cultural-historical tradition, they are united by the idea of the resourcefulness of preschool childhood and the importance of educational efforts aimed at maintaining the “sprouts of creativity”. In Russian studies, the question is raised about the means of creative abilities that allow us transforming the present situation (dialectical structures and symbols), as well as about the affective-volitional component of the creative process – the ability to detect a task. All this distinguishes the concepts that were born within the framework of the cultural-historical approach from the theory of creativity by J. Guilford and E. Torrance. At the same time, it is indicated that children’s activities (playing, storytelling, experimentation, etc.) are still rarely considered in research as a context for the manifestation of creative abilities.

Conclusion. The article concludes that it is important to conduct new research, both ascertaining and longitudinal, which will allow us to take the next steps in understanding how the means of developing creative abilities are mastered in children’s activities and how this affects the formation of creative abilities in subsequent ages.

The article describes the results of the development and testing of a scale for evaluating conditions for the development of creative abilities in kindergarten. The review part discusses the process of “democratizing the concept of creativity” and changing ideas about the importance of developing creative abilities in preschool childhood as a significant trend in modern psychology and education. The methodological basis of the work is: structural-dialectical approach (N. Veraksa), where the construct of “dialectical thinking” is used to describe intellectual creativity, which is understood as a system of mental actions that allows solving paradoxical situations, transforming contradictory situations in such a way that a new solution to the problem appears; the concept of imagination, which is understood as the ability to “grasp” the whole before the parts and transfer the features of one object of reality to another (Ilyenkov, 1984; Dyachenko, 1996); an approach to the development of ECERS quality assessment scales.

The scale for assessing the conditions for the development of creative abilities in kindergarten presented in the article includes four indicators: understanding of development processes, questioning, invention and transformation of contradictions, imagination.

32 preschool groups took part in the approbation. The validity of the instrument was assessed by the method of contrasting groups identified on the basis of expert assessments. Reliability was determined by the method of consistency of expert assessments: in each group, experts carried out the assessment in pairs and independently of each other. The focus of the observations was: working with imagination, quality questions addressed to children, to allow easy experimentation, supportive emotional atmosphere, sensitivity to children new and original solutions and inventions emphasis is on working with thinking as a process, reflecting the processes of change and transformation, capable to resolve conflicts.

The analysis showed that the assessment tool makes it possible to distinguish between contrasting groups for all four indicators at a significance level not lower than 0.05, which indicates its validity. Also, a high consistency of expert assessments was found both at the level of indicators and at the level of individual indicators, which indicates its reliability. The Alpha-Cronbach coefficient is 0.87, which indicates a good level of internal consistency of the instrument. The tool allows to identify and analyze the parameters of the quality of preschool education, attention to which is not emphasized in other scales, for example, in the ECERS-3 scales for a comprehensive assessment of the quality of preschool education.

The obtained data on the reliability and validity of the developed tool allow us to conclude that it can be used to assess the conditions for supporting and developing the creative abilities of children in preschool groups.