CC BY
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Вестник ХНАДУ, вып. 78, 2017
УДК 378.147
SOME APPROACHES TO DEVELOPING FUTURE ENGINEERS' MORALITY WHEN TEACHING ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE
N. Saienko, Prof., Dr. Sc. (Ped.), Kharkiv National Automobile and Highway University
Abstract. The role of moral education in technical university students' training is considered. The reasons of enhanced interest to parables as a means of ethic development in the present day reality are revealed. The key components of the process of teaching morality through foreign language are substantiated.
Key words: morality, technical university students, parables, methods, foreign language.
НЕКОТОРЫЕ ПОДХОДЫ К ВОСПИТАНИЮ МОРАЛЬНОСТИ БУДУЩИХ ИНЖЕНЕРОВ В ПРОЦЕССЕ ПРЕПОДАВАНИЯ АНГЛИЙСКОГО ЯЗЫКА
Н.В. Саенко, проф., д.пед.н., Харьковский национальный автомобильно-дорожный университет
Аннотация. Рассмотрена роль этического воспитания в подготовке студентов технического вуза. Раскрыты причины повышенного интереса к иносказаниям как средству морального воспитания в реалиях сегодняшнего дня. Обоснованы ключевые компоненты процесса развития моральности посредством иностранного языка.
Ключевые слова: моральность, студенты технического вуза, иносказания, методы, иностранный язык.
ДЕЯК1 П1ДХОДИ ДО ВИХОВАННЯ МОРАЛБНОСТ1 МАЙБУТН1Х 1НЖЕНЕР1В У ПРОЦЕС1 ВИКЛАДАННЯ АНГЛ1ЙСБК01 МОВИ
Н.В. Саенко, проф., д.пед.н., Харьк1вський нацюнальний автомобшьно-дорожнш ушверситет
Анотац1я. Розглянута роль етичного виховання в тдготовщ cmydenmie техтчного ВНЗ. Роз-крито причини тдвищеного ттересу до тосказань як засобу морального виховання в peaлiяx сьогодення. Обгрунтовано mw4oei компоненти процесу розвитку мopaлънocmi за допомогою iH03eMH0i моей.
Ключов1 слова: моральность, студенти техтчного ВНЗ, тосказання, методи, тоземна мова.
Introduction
Such realities of the present day as terrorism, local wars, refugees, religious, racial and national intolerance, the threat of the third world war, trafficking people and drugs, violence, hatred, dominance of poor examples of popular culture have one common root - the lack of spirituality and morality. Nowadays the level of education and socialization of a technical university student is mostly determined by formation of a set
of specific competences, such as professional, economic, environmental, legal, computer, communication and so on. But the person with all these competences is not a human yet, unless his main qualities - spirituality and morality -are formed.
Besides, today many employers pay particular attention to an applicant's personal qualities, their ethics and responsibility. That is why many philosophers believe that spirituality will be the
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leading value of the present century as opposed to hypertechnolization of the society.
Today the developers of concepts of higher technical education are trying to decide by joint efforts what the personality of the engineer, who will lead the world to progress, not to destruction, should ideally look like. The condition for achieving this ideal is the formation of the engineer's professional ethics.
Engineering ethics as a system of rules express social demands to activities and conduct of an engineer taking into account specifics of their work and relationships within the professional environment. However, the general principles of professional ethics are based on universal moral standards, such as good and evil, duty and responsibility, etc.
Recent Papers Review
Many works of researchers worldwide deal with spiritual life and morality (M. Bakhtin, I. Bech, M. Berdyaev, B. Bratus, S. Frank, O. Leontiev, A. Maslow, R. May, A. Milts, C. Rogers, S. Rubinstein, H. Skovoroda, V. Vernadsky, L. Vygotsky, V. Zinchenko, I. Zyazyun, P. Yurkevich and others). However, the search for new effective tools of developing ethics and spirituality of the youth has always been a task of strategic importance.
Above all spiritual development is associated with moral education, which results in performing the standards of moral conduct, internalizing the categorical imperative, according to which you should treat others as you want them to treat you, and the question that confronted Socrates many centuries ago: «Can virtue be taught?» is still poignant in philosophy of education. Teaching morality is the component of education, whose objectives and methods are the most difficult to determine. One can know what is good and right, but does not live by their laws, and only education can provide the moral growth of a young man, because people are not born moral, they become moral.
Morality can be developed through the use of allegoric tales - parables, fairy tales, myths, legends, fantasy stories, moral dilemmas (all of them are further referred as parables) - when teaching the English language.
The role of parables in education is studied by B. Bettelheim, J. Brewster, V. Bubnova, A. Bunyatova, T. Desiatova, N. Doroshenko, G. Ellis, L. Gladkikh, L. Korotkov, L. Kready, F. O'Connor, V. Sukhomlynsky, M. Tatar, K. Ushinsky, I. Vachkov, M. Warner, A. Wright and others. However, the didactic opportunities of parables for foreign language teaching of technical university students have not been studied enough.
Purpose and Problem Description
The objective of the article is to study the resource the parables have in teaching English as a foreign language to engineering students and give some practical recommendations to language teachers on how to use them.
Teaching Morality through Learning a Foreign Language
The interest of various people to tales in recent years has increased excessively. This is not about a constant demand for classic children's fairy tale books: parents have read them to their kids and continue to read. The matter is different. We are witnesses of completely new and unusual phenomena: the madness around the Harry Potter books that are published by millions of copies worldwide; popularity of fantasy novels and parables by Paulo Coelho, incredible success of Lord of the Rings trilogy that all are nothing more but fairy tales for adults. How can it be explained? Why do tales capture the hearts and minds of not only children (it is not surprising), but also a huge majority of adults around the earth?
The first factor is social. On the one hand, safe and carefree life of one part of the population directs their attention to consuming fairy tales products for entertainment. On the other hand, the fantastic world gives the opportunity to the other (bigger) part of the population to get distracted from everyday problems and plunge into a completely different - amazing and wonderful reality. The second factor is the tradition of arts: art products have always featured metaphoric nature. The third factor is the mythological nature of human thinking. The concept of C. Jung (Jung, 1996) proves that even the modern civilized person is sometimes guided in his real life not by rational thinking, but by attitudes that do not obey the laws of formal logic. This can explain the unconscious desire for fairy tales. The
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fourth factor is the specific properties of metaphor, which makes fresh accents, helps people rethink their experience. The fifth factor is scientific. The current level of science is characterized as transition to postnonclassical paradigm that implies rejection of traditional deterministic ideas about the world order and emphasizes its dialogic character, recognizes the multiplicity of truths. Within this paradigm philosophical ideas of antiquity, eastern teachings, views of writers, artists, religious leaders are regarded as philosophical foundations of science [1].
The American writer F. O'Connor said that «a story is a way to say something that can't be said any other way. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate» [2].
Tale, myths, legends are described as narrative, often folk poetic works about fictional people and events, mostly involving magic power to explain the origin and nature of the world, the destiny of man, a short, instructive story including truth and fiction (Ozhegov, 1986). There is usually nothing mystical in parables, and miracles, so typical for fairy tales happen rarely. They describe situations that could actually happen, but avoiding too much specificity. Therefore in parables the action takes place in some abstract space, the main thing is the thought, idea and wisdom. Parables are often timeless, you never understand when and where the action happens, so they are eternal. Dilemma is a combination of judgments, conclusions with two opposing provisions that exclude the possibility of the third one, a condition in which the choice of any of the two contradictory decisions is difficult.
The feature of most allegoric stories is the good end. This gives the reader a sense of psychological security and proves that «all the trials that befell the heroes were needed in order to make them stronger and wiser. On the other hand, the person who made an ill act, will surely obtain his deserts. And a hero who goes through all the tests, showing their best qualities will necessarily be rewarded. This is the law of life: the way you treat the world, you are treated by the world» [3]. Parables have a rich social, moral and educational potential. They teach, educate, warn, encourage the activity and even cure that can be considered as their most important functions. The renowned psychiatrist B. Bettelheim writes that they teach «how to navigate life» [4]. And finally, allegoric tales provide a vital basis
for language training and thereby take on a new importance in the students' English [5].
During the foreign language classes, in addition to developing the ability to make moral choices, parables enrich vocabulary, perfect speaking skills.
When selecting tales for students it seems expedient to follow the principle of selection proposed by L. Kready. The fundamental thing is students' interest. They also enjoy: a sense of life, the beautiful, wonder, mystery, magic, adventure, success, action, humor, portrayal of human relations, the simple and the sincere, transformation, a happy end.
M. Lipman wonders what kind of ethical education the men who later tortured their fellow human beings had been offered and why this education didn't work. The author hypothesizes that they had probably received an indoctrinating ethical education based on unquestioned traditional or religious beliefs that they later abandoned [6]. This means that mere instruction in morality is not sufficient to nurture virtues. One should remember that excessive verbalism in education, inept repetition of even noble ideas can generate only nihilistic attitude towards them.
The great philosopher M. Buber tells the story of how he fell into «the fatal mistake of giving instruction in ethics» by presenting ethics as formal rules and principles. Buber discovered that very little of this kind of education gets «trans-formed into character-building substance». He recalls: «I try to explain to my pupils that envy is despicable, and at once I feel the secret resistance of those who are poorer than their comrades. I try to explain that it is wicked to bully the weak, and at once I see a suppressed smile on the lips of the strong. I try to explain that lying destroys life, and something frightful happens: the worst habitual liar of the class produces a brilliant essay on the destructive power of lying» [7].
In the process of moral development the most important task is to transfer social values in personal ones, the values that determine the individual's behavior. The moral person is characterized by deep awareness of ethical principles and norms as principles and norms of his own behavior when the person acts not due to immediate external effects but due to his own attitudes.
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Researchers point out the unity of moral knowledge, positive attitudes and practical behavior in morality formation. Some scholars (J. Averyll, A. Barron, L. Bloom, L. Dorfman, S. Maslov and others) claim that emotional reaction precedes the cognitive one. Emotions can be taught and resulted in the person's active social position, assuming that it is not enough to feel pity, pain, compassion, injustice, resentment, it is much more important to be capable of defending their moral position, not just compassionate, but also try to help those in need.
Thus, based on the intellectual and emotional structure of the individual, we will consider the following key components of the process of teaching morality to technical university students which should be taken into account when developing methods of work with parables: 1) knowledge about the content of moral principles, accepted emotionally; 2) moral estimation 3) moral patterns of actions; 4) realizing moral behavior in practice.
Spiritual and moral values become the individual's inner gain due to special educational tools aimed at transforming knowledge and experience into inner strength. That is why there is a need of developing new and perfecting existing methods of moral education by means of foreign language.
Such researchers as J. Brewster, G. Ellis, A. Wright worked fruitfully on the problem of introducing fabulous tales into the structure of foreign language lessons. Tales can be used as supplementary material to the existing course books in English, they should be selected in compliance with thematic blocks recommended by curriculum; they are small in size, and the number of tasks to each story can vary according to the level of students' knowledge.
Using fantasy stories refers to the so-called method of educational metamorphoses, which proves that even in the mind of the already adult person fundamental changes may happen. This method is realized through philosophical dialogue, i.e., inviting students to question and to find for themselves the reasons for choosing the particular decision or making the opposite one. Value reflection is realized through clearly defined questions that make students reflect on the importance of values. Training implies classroom practice for acceptance of modified models of behavior in various situational profession-
al contexts. And «the teacher, while being an authority figure is not authoritarian at all, but a guardian of impartiality» [6].
Besides, the following tasks can be used for working with allegoric tales during the foreign language lessons: reading tales with further discussion; telling tales; characteristics of heroes with expressing attitude to them; continuation of the famous fairy tale («What happened next?»); changing the end of the tale; comparison of the same characters from different tales; writing the mini-essay «Letter to the hero»; inventing questions addressed to the characters of the tale; dramatization; inventing tales; the character's «trial»; associating with heroes of the tale «Who could you play in the tale?»; inventing a tale by the available model; guessing the situation («What would happen if ...»); dialogic tale telling. It is advisable to use project work with its «material» outcomes: collage, album of illustrations, creating comics for the story with emphasizing key points.
One of the types of educational metamorphoses is dilemmas that demand students' active reflective activities. Ethical dilemmas are effectively solved by compromise, smoothing contradictions and achieving a reasonable balance of interests, persuasion, appealing to conscience, reason, common sense.
Here is an example of moral dilemmas: The Value of a Promise
A friend confides to you that he has committed a particular crime and you promise never to tell. Discovering that an innocent person has been accused of the crime, you plead with your friend to give himself up. He refuses and reminds you of your promise. What should you do? In general, under what conditions should promises be broken?
One more method which can be recommended to achieve goals of ethical education is the Forum theatre (A. Boal) as a means of teaching people how to change their world. The Forum theatre can be used while dramatizing stories and during this process audience members can stop a performance, often a short scene in which a character is being oppressed in some way. The audience would suggest different actions for the actors to carry out on-stage in an attempt to change the outcome of what they see. It enables participants to try out actions which could be applicable to their everyday lives. The subject of
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the game may be drugs, aggression, bullying, infidelity and the like [8].
Conclusion
The task of technical universities is to strengthen the ethical orientation of teaching students not only special subjects, but also humanities and social sciences, including foreign languages, as the engineer should reflect on technology and the future of the world in the context of social responsibility of representatives of technical professions.
Parables as a means of ethic education can ensure pedagogical correction of social behavior, since at all times they have offered a role model, contributed to the development of positive interpersonal relationships, social skills and patterns of behavior, moral and human qualities, relieved tension, established rapport, trust, taught to solve conflicts. All this can be achieved with the use of interesting materials touching everlasting problems during the English language classes.
References
1. Бачков И. Введение в сказкотерапию / И. Бачков. - М. : Генезис, 2011. - 288 с.
2. O'Connor F. Mystery and Manners / F. O'Connor. - New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990. - 256 p.
3. Бунятова A.P. Роль сказки в формировании духовно-нравственных ценностей у детей дошкольного возраста / А.Р. Бунятова // Успехи современного естествознания. - 2010. - № 6. - С. 85-88.
4. Bettelheim B. The Uses of Enchantment / B. Bettelheim. - New York: Random House, 1976. - 328 p.
5. Kready L.F. A Study of Fairy Tales / L.F. Kready. - Boston : The Riverside Press, 1916. - 456 p.
6. Lipman M. Philosophy in the Classroom / M. Lipman, A. Sharp, F. Oscanyan. - Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980. - 100 p.
7. Buber M. Between Man and Man / M. Buber. - New York: Macmillan Pub. Co., Inc., 1978. - 105 p.
8. Fridrichova P. Strategy and Methodology of Ethical Education in Slovak Republic / P. Fridrichova // Social and Behavioral Sciences. - 2013. - Vol. 106. - P. 24442449.
Рецензент: Ю.В. Батыгин, профессор, д.т.н.,
ХНАДУ.
