Current Approaches and Directions of Design Education of the Environmental Design Department of KSADA: Traditions and Innovations

The contents of this article is considered as a process of rethinking and summarizing the specifics of professional training of higher education students of the Environmental Design department, KSADA with an overview of today’s promising trends and taking into account European standards and values. The article provides a detailed analysis of methodological approaches, indicating the relevance of their implementation in the system of design higher education of the Environmental Design department. The research methodology is based on the application of methods of analysis, synthesis and generalization. In turn, the principle of retrospective and predictive orientation made it possible to determine the main trends of the educational process, which were important in the past and remain relevant today; to reveal them gradually through the systematization of visual materials, which is a methodical archive of the Department of Environmental Design, and, most importantly, to emphasize the prospects for the development of design education in the future. The systematization of approaches (ethnocultural, ecological, and inclusive) made it possible to identify positive changes that were revealed during the delivery of the lecture course, fixed during the individual work of students on creative research project concepts. In the course of processing of the article material, the pedagogical system of personality formation of future designers was justified, indicators of effectiveness and perspective of the proposed approaches were determined. The main results of the training of higher education seekers are demonstrated on visual examples of project solutions of the 3rd–4th year students of the Environmental Design educational and vocational training program and the 1st year students of the educational and vocational training program Architectural-Landscape Environment Design (on the example of the professional disciplines: Design, Work in the material, and Internship).