About the Programme

The target audience of the master’s programme is primarily school teachers of history – graduates of teacher training universities, undergraduate and specialist’s programmes in history and socio-human sciences who are willing to get not only fundamental, but versatile history education which is in line with the requirements of the modern school. The traditional model of history (and primarily, pedagogical) education has focused on the accumulation of a certain volume of factual knowledge and explanatory schemes. But this programme involves mastering knowledge and skills which will allow the students to independently get, analyze and critically comprehend and interpret retrospective information, both from the existing arsenal of historical science and directly from different types of historical sources (verbal, visual, statistical etc.). This requires an advanced knowledge of modern developments in theory and methods of both history resource-study and historiography and specific history research.

The key achievements in the history science over recent decades, have been made thanks not only to the revealing of new sources, but because of the development of new approaches, tools and methods of analysis and synthesis of retrospective information. In addition to this, today’s fast-growing information resources of various origin require an efficient and qualified analysis of the new data, its academic evaluation, along with comments and generalization from a professional historian (especially from the one working in history education). For this purpose, special training is needed which will allow the history teacher to freely move around both in the existing and the potential information systems of history data. This is what this programme is aimed at.

The logic of education in this master’s programme is conditional on the training of modern experts in information resources for history science. The selection of the courses is based on an attempt to show the evolution of different areas and forms of historical knowledge, with a focus on its information basis which define the opportunities, and at the same time the limits (methodological), for the understanding of human history. The advantages of this programme are : a balanced combination of innovative courses (many of which have no precedents in the practice of national education), the variety of forms of practical usage of the received knowledge and the use of the project form of education.

The structure of the programme includes three key areas:

• Theory and methodology of history science (from the history of forming and building of history as a specific area of science, the development of ideas on the essence of the historical process, its direction, stages and factors which influence it, to the evolution of the concept of the object and subject of the history research, the opportunities and limits of historical cognition);
• Theoretical and methodical bases of historical resource-study and historiography (evolution of the concepts of the forms and contents of the sources of retrospective information, the history of tools and methods for resource study and historiographical analysis and synthesis, including the problems with the use of data and methods from related sciences as well as natural sciences and mathematical methods of data processing);
• History of forms, means and methods of historical reconstruction, its professional critical analysis and expertise (from simple retelling of the sources to modern verified methods of selection and synthesis of information received from the sources, structural information, as well as data from other, including, non-human, sciences).

The educational programme consists of two modules.The first one includes compulsory courses in philosophy and sociology of science, history of knowledge and historiography. They form the core of the programme and provide fundamental training. The second module consists of six pairs of optional courses which provide systematic knowledge on the history of information resources for history science. For those students who didn’t recieve their bachelor’s degrees in history from the HSE or studied another subject, adaptation courses are offered. Adaptation courses are read during the first year of the programme, the compulsory courses – during the first and the second years, and the optional disciplines during the second year. The third year of study is dedicated to the preparation of the master’s thesis.