Development and Teaching: Under what Conditions Teaching May Become “Developmental”?

The article deals with methodological problems of the study of laws of the development of activities of the subject as an objective process and the role of training as a socially determined activity focused on the development of the subject of activity (based on a number of speeches by the author on the problem of interrelation between education and development in a number of International and All-Russian conferences in 2012–2015). It is shown that pedagogical treatment of development dominates in Russian psychology; this is reYected in the characteristic of its main stages, which is based on the current structure of the education system, and also in understanding the very process of development as a process of adoption of social experience. Thus, they practically ignore the view on development as a process of self-motion of activity deZned as “ripening” of internal contradictions of its implementation in a concrete socio-historical context, which structure, in turn, depends on a concrete society's mode of production and basic contradictions of its socio-economic development. Taking into account that each individual entering this society as a person becomes a barrier of certain social dispositions, the “mechanism” of the development of his / her activity is deZned as the resolution of contradictions when taking part in joint activity. From a psychological point of view these contradictions – depending on a stage and period of the development of activity – may be either a contradiction between the formed ways of action and the system of relations emerging in the activity of the subject (in which he / she is objectively involved from birth), or as a contradiction between the formed system of relations and forming modes of action, which in psychological terms are expressed in the di[erentiation of the person's motivational preferences at each stage of the development of his / her activities. Special attention is paid to the dependence of forms of manifestation of laws of the development process from concrete conditions and the content of the joint activity, when training is its particular form. On the basis of the o[ered understanding of the mechanisms of the development of activities the author concludes that a “developing” nature of training is determined by a stage of the development of the activity of the subject, when either operational resources o[ered by training or his / her entry into a new system of relations may become motivationally signiZcant for him / her.