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A COMPETENCY APPROACH IN PROFESSIONAL GUIDANCE FOR 8TH AND 9TH GRADE STUDENTS AT EXTRACURRICULAR CLASSES: THE METHODICAL ASPECT
I. I. Troitskaya
This report examines the experience of applying a competency approach method in professional guidance for senior high school students by means of theatrical activity at extracurricular classes held at a regular high school. The study was conducted on the basis of Lyceum #8 in the city of Nizhny Novgorod.
Theatrical activity conducted within the framework of the program “Professional self-determination by means of theatrical activity” for 8th and 9th grade students is the means for solving this problem. Lessons take place during homeroom classes (1 hour per week) at school. The program helps to integrate the various creative unions of children on a common informative basis, and to coordinate the work of teachers of extracurricular activities and subject teachers within the unified educational process of the school. Furthermore, theatrical activity is one of the important factors of professional guidance within extracurricular activities at a regular school, which is predetermined by the specific features of the theater, its functions, structure and multidimensionality. The theater not only enables contacts with the world of art, but also allows getting acquainted with many professions involved in preparing a performance, and in particular, in such spheres of relations as: person - person, person - nature, person - sign system, person - technology, person - artistic image.
Staging performances during theater classes at school is implemented by the children themselves under the guidance of an extracurricular teacher, a homeroom teacher, subject teachers and by their direct participation in a performance. The children play the parts of actors, directors, artists, playwrights, and musicians. In this case children obtain the opportunity not only to get acquainted with the basics of dramatic art, and the particularities of theater professions, but also to be engaged in professional auditions. During the auditions the children obtain experience in the kind of work which they chose, and they try to identify whether the nature of this work meets their skills and abilities or not.
Program objectives: to reveal the scientific basics of professional guidance for students; to actualize the process of professional selfdetermination by means of specific activities that imply getting knowledge about oneself, about the world of professional labor, and about moral and ethical norms exposed by a profession and a society; to develop an ability to find and apply one’s skills in a variety of professions; to aim for lifelong
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education, education throughout one’s career. Students learn to generalize knowledge with the help of theatrical activity, reflecting the moral ideas and examples of successful and unsuccessful careers.
Program tasks: to form an active attitude towards labor as a meaningful, ethical and personally important value; to help students find and select a profession according to their vocation; to increase the level of psychological competence of students by equipping them with the appropriate knowledge and abilities; to help them to acquire the basic practice during auditions; to teach them self-organization, self-discipline, self-actualization and self-fulfillment within the selected profession; to advise them on methods of development of professionally significant qualities through trainings and exercises using Stanislavsky's system.
We have determined the following competencies that have to be acquired as a result of the program, namely: personal, metadisciplinary and disciplinary.
Personal results. Professional and working competency: acquisition of individual career-oriented experience, developing the ability for taking independent actions in an unpredictable and unstable situation on the labor market; awareness of the ethics of employment and social relations; energy for personal achievements in the various spheres of activity. Educational and cognitive competency: acquisition of the complex of common educational components (knowledge, skills, abilities) along with experience at participating in auditions; initiative and independence in the solution of creative and educational problems of different levels; establishing abilities to design one’s individual and collective professional and creative activity; skills of self-analysis and the ability to set creative goals. Value and meaning competency: an attitude to labor and profession as to a value; the selection of a profession according to one’s vocation; building a professional career according to the laws of morality; development of artistic taste as the ability to aesthetically perceive, feel and estimate the results and activity of professionals. Creative competency: development of artistic and creative thinking, which is an inseparable part of a person’s holistic thinking, development of imagination, fantasy, intuition, visual, auditory, and motor memory; improvement of speech and flexibility.
Metadisciplinary results. Professional and working competency: developing consistent needs for socially valuable labor, such as self-service at school and at home; productive labor (mainly work in student production workshops); studying labor that includes mental and physical labor (in the schoolyard, in school workshops, at lessons of technologies); creative labor during the creation of a common product, the performance. Educational
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and cognitive competency: an understanding of the role of personal professionalism in the development of one’s country, its economic power; the ability to notice the same historical fact in the content of different subjects; expansion of the sphere of cognitive interest, a harmonious intellectual and creative development; abilities of using information and information technologies (computer, audio-video recordings, the Internet, etc.). Value and meaning competency: development of an active attitude to folk traditions and culture as to a meaningful, ethical, aesthetical and personally significant value; development of respect for local culture and art, applied folk arts (crafts), architecture, music, literature, theatre; a tolerance toward another culture, another worldview, another point of view; an acquisition of the cultural traditions, moral cliche and norms of social behavior. Creative competency - an ability to find a creative approach to every type of activity, to find the general and the particular in the allied professions and to creatively modify the profession itself; to hold the aesthetic positions in a creative process, bringing beauty to human relations.
Disciplinary results. Professional and working competency: an acquisition of the basics of practical activity, namely: the elements of theatrical activity; the ability to create an individual and collective product, to promote it, etc. Educational and cognitive competency: an awareness of the world of professions, requirements exposed by professions, work equipment, work objects, demands of the labor market; knowledge on outstanding theater figures in world of art; an awareness of one’s skills and abilities. Value and meaning competency: comprehension of the spiritual legacy of mankind on the basis of emotional experience obtained in the process of preparing performances; a perception of the world of professions, of the "creators”, of professionals in their fields; an active attitude to the traditions of folk culture as to a meaningful, aesthetical and personally significant value. Creative competency - the practice of theatrical activity as a synthetic form of creative activity, a means of self-development and creative modification of the environment, interactions, communications (at work and when relaxing).
The study showed that the competency approach in the process of professional guidance for senior high school students by means of theatrical activity helps to provide an exact targeted orientation of this process towards specific results (personal, metadisciplinary and disciplinary) considering the individual and psychological particularities of a student, social demands, establishment of an aim at specific education and self-education, and the need for adaptation to changing social and economic conditions.
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