In June 2024, the 18th Psychologists’ Summit was held in St. Petersburg. The plenary session was opened by Alexander Asmolov with a speech titled «Crisis as a Test of Psychological Compatibility. From War of the Worlds to Commonwealth of Minds.» The speech highlighted the psychological and social aspects of crises, analyzed the concept of psychological compatibility, and discussed methods for overcoming crisis situations through mutual aid and social partnership. Special attention was given to differences in cultural and personal approaches to problem-solving. Above is the full text of the speech.

The aim of this paper is to develop the idea previously introduced by the authors about domestic education as a system and its semantic content. The authors turn to a comparison of approaches to domestic higher education as an object of socio-philosophical research. As a methodological basis for their analysis, they choose the system-communicative theory. It is proposed to consider the education system not from the point of view of the search for unity and unification, but from the position of its “specific distinction” proposed by Luhmann. The concept of «distinction» used by Luhmann differs in meaning from the concept of «contradiction», which Hegel considered as the source of all development. The origins of the theory of distinction lie in second-order cybernetics, developed in the 1970s and 1980s. As a first approximation, the meaning of «specific distinction» is preliminarily revealed in Gregory Bateson’s formulation: «Information is difference that makes difference».  The communicative approach to the analysis of the education system allowed the authors to come to the conclusion about the preference of its pre-adaptive behavior in comparison with the adaptive behavior. Thus, adaptation acts as a property of the system’s adjustment to already existing conditions and challenges from the external environment; pre-adaptation is the process of accumulation of excess (redundancy) potential, which contributes to the creation of effective mechanisms of the system’s own development with unpredictable challenges in the future. These two properties of the system are two sides of the same coin. Such an approach, from the authors’ point of view, will allow a better understanding of both the diagnostics of the current state of the educational system and the
methods for its possible reform.

The rising interest of science, education and business in human being in all their complexity is considered as a manifestation of a single trend that can be described in terms of human-centricity, anthropological turn or humanization. In business, within the framework of this trend, the usual ideas about human motivation are rapidly changing and the practices of working with it are undergoing transformation. The purpose of this article is to identify possible directions of such transformations. It is shown that the basis of human-centricity is an unfinished and fundamentally incomplete image of a human being. This leads to the fact that even the most advanced motivation theories, which integrate the achievements of various psychological schools, such as Self-determination Theory of R. Ryan and E. Deci, are not able to fully describe all possible qualitative types of motivation and all possible regulators of human activity. It is also shown that motivation practices in humancentered corporate cultures are aimed primarily at facilitating and strengthening autonomous types of motivation, which can be generically called motivation to the act. Modern companies operate in many ways as self-regulating and self-governing systems. And managers not only facilitate such motivation among employees, but also expect that employees will systematically commit acts. Managers of the world’s leading companies, as a rule, are convinced that only a free human being capable of acting autonomously and self-deterministically can create something truly outstanding. Controlled types of motivation play a secondary role. Moreover, in modern companies, corporate culture is organized in such a way that controlled types of motivation are the result of mediation of more autonomous types — the employee is given the opportunity to construct an individual system of incentives, objects of needs, introjects and identifications.

The article explores the concept of social imagination and methods for its development. The author analyzes the ability of individuals and communities to perceive social events and issues through the lens of various cultural, historical, and structural contexts. Social imagination is viewed as a key skill for effective social design and solving complex problems in contemporary society. Special attention is given to psychological characteristics and competencies such as empathy, temporal decentering, scenario thinking, and social intelligence. The article also describes technological tools that aid in the development of social imagination and provides examples of their practical application.

The article is devoted to the problem of analyzing cultural and historical practices as established tools for the development of personality and its worldview. The actual task is to create means of analyzing the psychological structure of practices and to develop theoretical bases for their description. We turned to the principles of Vygotsky’s concrete psychology as a methodology for describing and researching cultural-historical practices. The focus of attention was on dance and music-movement practices: classical dance, dance-movement therapy, and musical movement. The main parameters by which these approaches are analyzed, which allow us to evaluate the psychological content of the practice, are highlighted: the plastic canon of the practice, the image of the person, the learning situation, the relationship between movement and music, the type of communication between the teacher and the student and between the participants of the process, the role of improvisation, and others. The paper shows how different dance practices have different psychological orientation and form different personality structure. Thus, in classical dance a volitional personality is formed, which is subordinated to the rational beginning. On the contrary, dance-movement therapy emphasizes the importance of the unconscious in a person, involuntary impulses, emotions. Finally, musical movement emphasizes aesthetic experiences in which feelings are subordinated to musical form.

In spring 2024, the online cinema Okko, part of the Sber ecosystem, and the production company BMP presented the scientific show “Boundaries of Knowledge”. The host of the show was Albert Efimov, the Director of the Research and Innovation Office at Sberbank. The guests of the program were well-known Russian scientists, such as neurobiologist Konstantin Anokhin and mathematician Alexey Semenov. Konstantin Anokhin explained how our brain works, what hypernetwork theory of consciousness is, and where memory, reasoning, and thinking are located. Alexey Semenov talked about creating intuitive artificial intelligence, transforming personality in digital reality, and the relevance of mathematical problems in the modern world.
The article provides transcripts of the conversations.

The authors talk about two extremes in organizing the work of schoolchildren with a literary text: encouraging naive realism and training in literary analysis of the text. Five methodological principles of the organization of work with a literary text are outlined: 1) attention to behavioral triggers and moral guidelines of students; 2) refusal to encourage knowledge of the text in favor of encouraging understanding of the text; 3) integration of anti-examples into the lesson as a didactic technique; 4) evaluation of results using the criterion of «dialogue with the author»; 5) cultivation of thoughtful reading without inflections in the factual text and literary criticism. The leading aspects of the reader’s cognitive motivation are revealed: motivation through novelty develops well–readedness; through self-knowledge reflexivity; through interaction - sociability. The results of a survey of literature teachers are presented: 15 respondents from 4 educational organizations in Moscow, shortcomings in the organization of work with the text are revealed: deactualization of educational tasks; focus on speech development instead of personality development; lack of connection with the techniques of understanding learning; reduction of the variability of the arguments of the author’s position based on various units of literary text. New approaches to working with literary text are considered taking into account pedagogical hermeneutics, the theory of dialogue of cultures and psychodidactics. The directions of professional development of literature teachers are justified from the standpoint of the subjectivity of a student comprehending the quasi-reality of a literary text. The key task of working with the text is to foster interest in the artistic text as a means of self–knowledge. 

The article is devoted to the description of the results of the creation and testing of the ecosystem of personnel partnership to ensure the operation and development of the municipal education system in a situation of shortage and movement of personnel in the territories bordering the megalopolis (using the example of the city of Naro-Fominsk, Moscow region). In the course of the study of domestic and foreign practices of preventing and eliminating personnel shortages in the education system, the reasons for migration and dismissal of teaching staff are analyzed. Personally significant indicators of involvement in the profession including in particular: «recognition and values», «autonomy», «skill» and «atmosphere of cooperation» are highlighted. The key vectors of the application of managerial decisions contributing to the solution of personnel problems of the education system are identified: the formation of organizational culture, reducing the academic load, creating conditions for professional growth of teachers, etc. Recommendations have been developed for heads of educational organizations and heads of municipal education authorities on the preservation and involvement of teaching staff. It is shown that the organization of personnel partnerships based on an ecosystem approach is one of the effective mechanisms for attracting and retaining personnel for organizing activities and ensuring the development of educational organizations. The article presents the ecosystem of personnel partnership developed by the author and tested in the city of Naro-Fominsk, Moscow region. The main principles of the presented ecosystem are student-centricity, personalization of education and project activities in children’s and adult communities. The model provides conditions and opportunities for self-determination and self-realization of schoolchildren, the development of educational organizations, urban and rural socio-cultural environments. During testing, it was possible to organize the work of the project school “Aspiring Entrepreneur” in partnership “school – business – executive power”; create an Olympiad movement for schoolchildren in the partnership “children – subject teachers – external experts from the OC “Vzlyot” – external NTI instructors”; to open a municipal scientific society of students “Primrose of Science” in partnership “student – teacher – scientist – business – executive power”.

Despite feedback being proved to be one of the most influential factors of the learning process with a high effect size which can be seen in every lesson, there is still a large deficit of research in this area in the Russian scientific field. Existing studies often review foreign theories and practices, which are not always applicable to the Russian context due to differing socio-cultural backgrounds, such as the lack of basic training for teachers in providing feedback in lessons. In addition to outlining the concept of feedback, the article delves into a relatively new concept – feedback literacy – from the perspective of aligning the term with current understanding of literacy and competencies in Russian science. It is suggested that it would be more appropriate to consider this construct not as literacy or competency but rather as a popular construct like problem-solving, learning to learn, and decision-making skills. Considering giving and receiving feedback as meta skills crucial for lifelong learning, there is a need for more research of the skills related to working with feedback. Furthermore, there is also a distinct lack of training programmes for teachers aimed at developing teacher feedback literacy.

Infrastructural safety of secondary general education institutions (GSI) is one of the main components of creating a comfortable environment for students in schools of the Russian Federation. Its observance is regulated by legislation and controlled by the relevant state bodies, local authorities and other organizations that perform publicly significant functions of control and management. At the moment, in the absence of a unified regulation on inspection of the territory adjacent to the secondary general education institutions (GSI), its inspection in most administrative districts is carried out by responsible employees, as a rule, 1–2 times a year. Monitoring of infrastructural safety of secondary schools, carried out in «manual» mode, provides for reporting, recording two states: there are or are not violations of the law when placing facilities near secondary schools. However, this approach does not provide an opportunity to assess the negative consequences of the location of infrastructure facilities without violating the legislation of the Russian Federation, but in sufficient proximity to the school. Nevertheless, as the practice of recent years shows, a number of infrastructure facilities that require control over the location in relation to the school, in fact, may be objects of increased danger to the health and development of students, although they are located without violating the law. The authors propose to automate this process in order to ensure the regularity of monitoring of infrastructure security of secondary schools and increase its accuracy. This will make it possible to monitor the location of infrastructure objects at any distance from the school and with any frequency.The creation of information systems that automate the monitoring process makes it possible to obtain the most accurate results, minimising the influence of the human factor on the quality of inspection. The paper considers a model developed by the authors to automate the inspection of school infrastructure security based on geo-information obtained from open sources, which allows systematic monitoring of the infrastructure surrounding the school for the location of objects requiring control, without significant labour costs associated with on-site visits of employees.The model serves for additional control over the infrastructure without excluding occasional participation of staff in on-site inspections. The workability of the model proposed by the authors is confirmed by the results of approbation at secondary schools in Ivanovo Oblast.