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CATEGORIZATION OF THE INTEGRAL TASK-ORIENTED COMPONENTS OF VOCATIONAL LYCEUMS TEACHERS'
ACTIVITIES AS A GOAL OF THEIR CONTINUING EDUCATION A. S. Mischenko
A socio-pedagogical survey of vocational lyceums in St. Petersburg (carried out in 1994 - 2008) has enabled us to identify two important areas of modernization of continuing education of teachers. These are: (1) an ability to develop an essential ("categorical") idea of a modern system of the integral task-oriented components of education and upbringing; and (2) a new "social reference" vector of developing teachers as agents of the system of relations with students. Due to the limited scope of this study, we will discuss only a few aspects that represent the essence of these two areas.
Our survey shows that the development of the first area of moderniazation of continuing education of vocational lyceum teachers should take into account the multipurpose nature of their activities. The fact is that the modern scope of a vocational lyceum teacher's activity contains a system of goals associated with education and upbringing of students. These goals include the following: socio-cultural development of the students; ensuring socialization of the students; development of teenagers as agents of productive labor; and development of their innovative, competitive, social and civil capacities. In other words, the vocational lyceum teachers are confronted with an entire system of goals for developing in young people the qualities associated with the orientations to success and confidence in their personal, professional and civil opportunities. All these goals should be deeply felt (and realized) by teachers in the course of their continuing education, because, in our opinion, they are adequate to the essence of the modern economy both in Russia and in the world (see Figure 1).
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Figure 1. The system of the integral task-oriented components of vocational lyceum teachers’ activities to be shaped in the course of continuing education
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The development of the second area of modernization of continuing education of teachers, in our opinion, depends on the possibility to implement three types of meaningful interactions with the students. They include the following: role-based interactions; subject - subject interactions; and personal ineteractions. Such grouping is valuable because these social interactions between teacher and students symbolize a shift from the dominance of "to have" principle to the dominance of "to be" disposition. The survey has enabled us to build and provide a theoretical justification for a social reference vector of teachers’ personal development in the course of their continuing education. This orientation of continuing education of a teacher creates the conditions, in which his personal evolution and dynamics of his interactions with students develop from the insularity and "deafness" (object relations) through harmonious (subject - subject) relations between teacher and students to a system of profound, truly human (personality - personality) communicative relations. Our monitoring and sociological survey show that the social reference vector of the professional lyceum teachers' development dynamically changes in this direction. This enables us to hope that in the modern context these processes will form a "basis" for the radical modernization of primary and secondary vocational education of young people.
Thus, the social and educational meaning of continuing education of teachers, in our opinion, should be associated with the training that will help them to develop an idea about the deep mechanisms of modern socialization and professionalization of young people and to develop their socio-cultural capacities at a professional level. This is connected with teaching teachers to perform independent "microsurveys" of the system of socio-economic and spiritual conditions of young people's life along with studying the essence of personal potential of students and developing in them a need to be active members of modern civil society. Our long-term research, in particular, shows that in the modern conditions continuing education of vocational lyceum teachers should provide them with the essential abilities and skills for solving problems associated with the integration of students into modern civil society, their professionalization and developing in them a system of professional values. It is also necessary to take into account that the content of continuing education of teachers and categorization of the integral task-oriented components of their activities are, in fact, conditioned by a few tendencies described below.
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First, social values have undergone drastic changes in society and among young people. The ways of integration of individuals into society which were promulgated and approved as valuable in the past, such as studying and working for the benefit of society, being committed, supporting one’s mates, enhancing team spirit, rejecting excessive material welfare, etc., are replaced with new principles. For some people it involves the pursuit of private ownership and capital and an aspiration for selfenjoyment; for others it is an everyday fight for jobs, working conditions, basic survival and good education; for still others it is mastering professional methods of work on the basis of private or collective ownership, using new freedoms for creative activities, searching for the opportunities to develop national and cultural traditions, etc.
Second, the methods of socialization have changed. While in the past, socialization of young people was in many cases supervised by the older generation, in the modern socio-economic and socio-political conditions the influence of educators of all types diminishes, because they themselves are subject to the social shifts, fluctuations, shakedowns and stresses. Socialization and integration of teenagers into civil society followed and still follows the path of strengthening their personal selforientation and self-organization. All this happens in the conditions where the new social changes and values have not yet developed into a legitimate criteria and norms-based paradigm for the development of personal qualities in the younger generation.
Third, the process of individualization of young people has become significantly more intensive. This is promoted by the replacement of the standard Soviet model of the "proper man" by a much greater diversity of competing behavior patterns, yet with the dominance of the "egoistic man" model. In our opinion, this leads to the "extreme" alternatives of youth stratification into "antagonistic" social groups. In these conditions, continuing professional education should ensure that teachers master the "corrective technologies" for different sets of criteria, standards and regulations, which teenagers rely upon.
Fourth, the process of personal integration into civil society is to a greater extent associated with professional training. The level of potential and real competitiveness of an individual becomes a center, while his creative and innovative capacities become a "core" or a deep essential characteristic of his involvement in modern civil society.
Thus, the scientific analysis of the categorization of the integral task-oriented components of activities and the social reference vector of
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development of modern teachers in the course of their continuing education enables us to do a few things: first, to consider the most important goals of continuing education on a comprehensive basis; second, to express them in the form of specific professional positions of teachers; and third, to take into account not only the scope of functional training of teachers, but also social mechanisms for integrating their continuous professional growth into the activities of a system of institutes of primary and secondary specialized education of young people. All this opens new opportunities for providing teachers with positive assistance in the course of their continuing education. This approach to continuing education of pedagogical staff enables us to suggest them the following paradigmatically important idea: in the modern context, labor training of young people should not be understood as a socio-economic and functionally instrumental technological process only (from the narrow perspective of its objective substantial characteristics). Students’ labor is, first of all, a special, axiologically objective subject matter of students’ attitude to their profession and a special personality-oriented form of the acquisition of spiritual and material culture of a particular society.
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