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THE GOALS OF TEACHERS’ ACTIVITY AS COMPONENTS OF CONTINUOUS DEVELOPMENT OF THEIR PROFESSIONAL CULTURE
A. S. Mischenko
The paper reveals a set of goals for educators' activities as the most important components of the mechanism of their continuous professional culture development assisting them in meeting the modern life challenges efficiently and effectively.
Key words: culture, socialization and professionalization of students, their competitiveness and creative capacity as the key components of developing educators' continuous professional culture.
Teachers’ professional culture is based on the target components of their activities. They define this professional culture’s continuous development. In the target components of a teacher, implicitly, there are value-based and sense-based structural units of the educational process.
Our research of the goals of activities of the secondary vocational school teachers of St. Petersburg (2009-2014) showed that more than half of them seek (aim to) to develop such qualities in their students as: (a) responsibility for their actions, diligence and perseverance, (b ) communication skills; high culture and erudition. Less than a third of teachers aim to develop such qualities as: (a) competitiveness; (b) students’ ability to make their work interesting; (c) developing children’s interest in their future profession; (d) the ability to generate new ideas; (e) the ability to do a better job, commitment to a family’s professional traditions; (f) the desire to lead any business, etc. The above-listed goals of teachers’ activities reflect their active role in organizing students’ social and cultural development and education, development of teenagers as subjects of productive labor, and improving students’ competitiveness and creative and innovative potential.
In particular, the social and cultural target component of educational activities, integrally, represents the educational role of educators, ensuring performance by students of their main social and cultural functions. From the point of view of this target component, continuous development of teachers' professional culture is paired with solving a difficult task of development of a student's personality, which is able to carry out all social and civil functions throughout his/her life; this process includes: family, everyday life, leisure, permanent or periodic involvement in different social systems (groups, community), activities in the field of production, etc. The implementation of this goal is based on the principle of integration of continuous development of activities, public relations, and professional culture of teachers. The essence of these processes is the recognition of material human activity as a primary, basic and integrative factor in the development of physical, mental, social and cultural qualities of teachers. Another important aspect of the study of these goals relates to the fact that their achievement serves as a criterion for the effectiveness of continuous development of a teacher’s professional culture. More active, conscious, purposeful involvement of future professionals in the process of creative exercise of their social and civic functions, a more universal range of their abilities developed by teachers, and more harmonious and more fruitful interaction with the surrounding reality leads to more efficient continuous development of the professional culture of their teachers. However, the
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nature of this relationship depends not only on the position taken by teachers in the society, but also on the development of the entire system of social and economic factors that are no less active in their influence on today’s students.
Thus, the continuous development of culture of teachers of lyceums and colleges is organically associated with the goals of students’ socialization. By reaching these goals, teachers contribute to the efficiency of interaction of teenagers with social communities and state institutions. As a result of this interaction, students accept, or do not accept (fully or partially) the current system of knowledge, norms and values of a particular society. This allows or does not allow them to participate in the life of this society. Socialization of an individual, therefore, can be considered not only to be an integral goal of educational activities achieved by a teacher, but also as a criterion of continuous development of professional culture. By itself, this goal of teachers’ activity not only has a focused character, but also is related to spontaneous processes and interactions of the subjects of education and society. The latter also affect the continuous development of teachers’ professional culture. In this case, students’ life positions, and students’ study of the new social and professional experience, are the intermediate outcome and an indicator of such development.
Continuous development of the professional culture of teachers of lyceums and colleges is naturally associated with the professionalization of students. By its nature, the professionalization of students has a complex interdisciplinary character. Its essence can be opened only at the intersection of cultural studies, sociology, demography, psychology and professional pedagogy. It integrally represents the interaction of cultural, social and professional development of both teachers and students. The complex disciplinary nature of this phenomenon, defined by three groups of signs, is likewise related to the level of continuity of development of teachers’ professional culture: firstly, through participation of teachers in the transition of students from fixed external regulations to internal selfregulation of labor and professional conduct; secondly, through the formation of internally aroused professionally value-based and professional cultural orientations of students; and, finally, thirdly, through the process of formation of students' activity-related and sense-related motives and values of work, practical experience, and public recognition as subjects of education and employment activities, communication and cognition, and lastly, as actors, with the help of which the mentees can achieve social and professional maturity. All this, ultimately, is expressed in the life ideals and aspirations of young people as subjects of the educational process. Thus, participation of teachers in students’ professionalization is a component that, through demonstration of different behaviors of other people, shows continuous development of their professional culture. This reflects a basic target line of teaching activities, as well as sociological and cultural approaches of teachers to organizing interrelated processes of socialization and professionalization (through training and education) of students.
Continuous development of the professional culture of teachers, through the realization of goals of educational and training activities, determines the transformation of students into the subjects of productive labor of society. This process includes a wide range of actions of teachers associated with the formation of young people’s different cultural, social and professional knowledge and skills. Taken together, they constitute the culture of the school and real life production activities. Both teachers and students take part in this process. There are the
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following components: technical, organizational, hygiene, social, personal and cultural components. When we talk about the formation of students as subjects of productive labor, as the basic goal of activity, and a component of continuous development of professional culture of teachers, we have in mind the following facts. Productive work acts as a factor of inclusion of teachers and students into the real field of production relations. This allows us to consider the most important factors of joint cross-over development of values and professional culture of both teachers and students. This, in turn, becomes possible due to the fact that productive work itself has a number of integrated features. Namely, essentially, it expresses the relationship between the development of production and culture of society; it allows you to objectively consider the unity of the social and professional creativity and morality of a person; it reveals the deepest layers of socio-economic relations of today’s production; expresses not only the structures of labor activity, but also the composition of its subjects; and it captures the main system factors of development of the productive forces of the society. Productive labor, as an institutional and social phenomenon, makes it possible, categorically, to combine into a single continuum the sociological, psychological and professional ideas of continuous development of the professional culture of teachers through analysis of the mechanism of formation by them of the essential social and professional characteristics of students, to express the principle, in accordance with which the individuality and personality of a human being in the productive labor, whether a teacher or a student, is not lost, but rather finds its ontological cultural characteristics.
The major characteristic of the continuous development of the professional culture of teachers is their focus on the development of the competitiveness of students of secondary vocational schools. The indicators of this goal of education of students, in our opinion, are the following: (a) students’ achievement of a high level of professionalism, mobility and the ability to continually improve their skills, (b) focus on continuing education; (c) the adaptability of students to rapidly changing conditions of life and production; (d) responsibility, diligence, initiative and creative approach to their profession, etc. In other words, teachers seeking to make the development of their professional culture continuous have an objective task of development of a special system of needs and interests of young people associated with their focus on success, self-confidence and professional opportunities. This requires teachers to apply cross-cultural, sociological and economic approaches to education and training of young people.
Another important goal, implicitly associated with the continuous development of the professional culture of teachers, includes the development by teachers of the innovative potential of their students. Fulfilling this goal allows teachers to clearly and specifically express the essence of students’ competitiveness in the field of public production and in the labor market, as well as systematically build the whole process of development of their professional and value-based relation to productive and creative activity in the manufacturing sector.
To summarize, we should note that the above goals of teachers’ activity allow teams of educational organizations to develop new understanding and to create new mechanisms of continuous development of professional culture of their teachers, thus, effectively and efficiently respond to the complex challenges of today’s life.
Translated from Russian by Znanije Central Translastions Bureas
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