The fifth issue of the UniverCity: Cities and Universities has been pubished in Russian featuring a collection of articles produced by MCU’s experts. The collection includes the research findings of the 2020–2021 academic year on various aspects of interaction between young learners and city spaces. These aspects include education quality in the modern city, public health, security and ecology. Below you can find a more detailed presentation of the research findings dedicated to the interaction between education and the city.
One of the articles that features a most comprehensive account of this research topic is The City as a Natural Environment for Education. It describes educational opportunities that Moscow offers its citizens. Urban learning environments are used by teachers in their professional activities, and by parents as part of family upbringing. The article examines city spaces that are attended by teachers, parents and their children for educational purposes and the way these visits are arranged.
The City Festival of Infrastructural Solutions is a unique educational event initiated by the Laboratory of Educational Infrastructures at the MCU’s Research Institute of Urban Studies and Global Education. It emerged from the experts’ idea to expand the understanding of the functionality of public learning spaces, to show their learning and community potential and to identify the best practices of infrastructural solutions. The event was a stepping stone for involving architects, designers, construction companies and educational institutions, and bringing their attention to the challenge of developing a learning infrastructure based on reorganization of school learning spaces. More details on the festival and its highlights are available in the article The City Festival of Infrastructural Solutions as a Learning Event for Moscow’s Schools.
A modern teacher is able to creatively use the learning potential of city objects in their professional activities. This approach extends further to different cities with extensive learning potential in the country and outside it, which can be creatively used in teaching different school subjects. To identify and assess the learning potential of foreign cities, a teacher must have certain foreign language competencies. The article Educational Potential of Urban Sites: Expanding the Boundaries offers a methodology for working with foreign language content aimed at developing subject and research competencies of a teacher.
The article with an original title School library, which way to the city? explains the role of a school library in solving school tasks and cultivating a reader who will grow into an active user of the city library. The authors of the article also present a collection of papers “A Reader in School” dedicated to describing various forms of participatory practices in a library.
The papers presented here and other articles are available on the page of the fifth issue UniverCity: Cities and Universities.