Digital Transformation of Professional Education: Internet-Assisted Signature Pedagogy for Learning Arts

The paper presents the study of the perspectives of the art education through the lenses of Shulman’ theory of signature pedagogy in the context of global digitalization. The changes in higher education determine noticeable transformations of the way of teaching and preparing future specialists. Currently the professional work of musicians and fine artists tends to shift from traditional environments to individual laptop with the access to Internet, where personal contacts between professionals are limited. In the past American scholar Shulman pointed the necessary to reexamine the fundamental signatures due to the development of computer-mediated and Web-based technologies, that redesign the professions. While he suggests the method of critique as a signature pedagogy for teaching arts, that is proposed by his followers as a model of dialogue between equal voices including self-, peer-, and faculty participants, the perspectives of this method at the Internet-assisted learning environments are curious for study. In such a context the purpose of this study was determined: Do the competence of self-critique is promoted through the Internet-assisted professional learning of arts based on the signature pedagogy approach? The research study was organized at Kazan Federal University, 486 undergraduate students of music and fine-art education were involved. The methodology used questionnaire, implemented by the google forms, and statistical methods: median, mean score, standard deviation, and Pearson chi-square test. The obtained results demonstrated that students who actively use Internet resources on the computer for making arts or training performing skills more than in traditional classroom through personal collaborations with colleagues or peers, demonstrate higher level of self-critique competence in professional training. Based on the analysis was concluded, in conditions of lacking personal interactions due the shifting to the Internet environment artists need to demonstrate their competences in critical self-assessment in the creative work. The study contributes to the perspectives of signature pedagogy approach, which needs to redirect the focus of teaching arts to self-critique at the Internet-assisted environment.