Activities of student pedagogical squads in the system of children's health camps: forms and methods of work

Abstract

A student pedagogical squad holds a dual position within the system of organizations for children's recreation and health improvement: it serves both as an environment for the professional formation of a future teacher and as a staffing element that supports the temporary children's collective. With about six million children covered and nearly forty thousand recreation organizations operating during the 2025 season, the forms and methods of the squad's own work remain described only fragmentarily, whereas the procedures for training a counselor are elaborated in considerably greater detail. The aim of the work is to systematize the forms and methods of a student pedagogical squad's activity in a children's health camp and to align them with the labor functions established by the professional standard. Conceptual-categorial analysis, a structural-functional approach, content analysis of the regulatory framework, and a modelling method were applied. An author's model was constructed in which the squad's forms of activity are ordered by the stages of the camp shift and by orientation, while the methods are ordered by the mode of pedagogical influence; a matrix of correspondence between methods and the counselor's labor functions is proposed. It was established that the squad maintains the integrity of its work by coordinating already mastered counselor tools with the logic of the temporary collective's development, rather than through a separate toolkit. The separation of training from the activity itself shows that the effectiveness of a shift is determined by the squad's ability to transfer a single methodological design onto different age and thematic conditions.