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DEVELOPING STUDENT PREPAREDNESS FOR PERMANENT PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION IN THE FIELD OF THEATER ARTS
O.I. Volpyanskaya,
N.A. Shmeleva
The attractiveness of education depends on the innovative nature of the educational milieu’s development, the integration of teaching staff efforts, and their engagement in the national innovation system aimed at the education of the younger generation in the spirit of spirituality and rectitude. Mutual aid, goodness, mercy towards each other, axiological priorities, and national mentality - we realize these and other humanistic virtues at one of Moscow's oldest educational institutions: State Budget-Funded Secondary Vocational Educational Institution “College of Theater Arts No. 60” (hereinafter, the “College”).
The main sense of the continuous education idea at the CTA EI is permanent creative renovation, development and improvement of every human being throughout his or her life. Within the framework of community study, employers from the theater sphere were polled and interviewed. The results of the study revealed an acute need for highly skilled personnel at the Moscow theatrical entertainment facilities. Here are some results of this study: employees in the 20-to-40-year age group comprise 30% of staff and those from 40 to 60 years 70%;
(b) employees who have a specialized theater education comprise 30% of personnel, those with an elementary education 30%, and those with secondary and higher professional education 20%; (c) college graduates comprise 30% of the number of employees; (d) the general level of college graduates' professional training is assessed by the employers as fair (40%) and better than fair (60%); (d) the employers are dissatisfied with low quality of training of those employees who have specialized (60%) and elementary (40%) level training; (e) the employers think that quality training of professionals in the field of theater arts at all stages of continuous professional training is possible, provided the material and technical base of the educational institution is improved and organizational educational conditions ensuring high quality of the educational process are created; (f) according to the employers, supplementary professional education is needed for employees belonging to the senior age group (100%); and (g) it has become necessary to develop practice-oriented programs and courses of professional training and retraining for employees engaged in the theater arts field.
A custom-made questionnaire for students, focused on the continuation of permanent professional education at theater arts educational institutions, was used for diagnostics. The analysis of the diagnostic results permits one to maintain that the majority of students (67.3%) consider the general level of professional training in the field of theater arts to be high. Nevertheless, 86.4% of students are dissatisfied with the fact that supplementary specialized knowledge is unavailable for them in the course of their future professional activities, and 87.5% of those polled answered that they did not understand the sense of permanent professional education and its value to their own personal development. In connection with this
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fact, we asked the following question: "Do you intend to continue your training within the framework of specialized supplementary professional training programs?" Only 15% of those polled answered this question in the affirmative; nevertheless, they also think that both educational and personal motives facilitate the achievement of set aims.
In this connection, the problem of forming students' preparedness for continuous professional education in the sphere of theater and arts becomes essential; its specificity is determined by the binary essence of their skills and manifests itself in the distinctiveness and novelty of both the process itself and the result of educational activities, in the utilization of a creative approach in the process of solving theoretical and practical training tasks. We view students' preparedness for continuous professional education as a complex, nonlinear, and unbalanced process. Its positive dynamics depends on dialectical interconnection and interaction of the internal and external factors determining it. The internal (subjective) factors are connected with understanding of the necessity of continuing to enhance one's skill level in the system of continuous professional education, as well as with the system of values determining their attitude towards continuous professional education and the existence of one's own commitment to continue education and strive to obtain new experience in both professional and personal spheres. Requirements concerning future professional activities and socio-cultural environment (during the period of training, this is, first and foremost, the nature and quality of organization of the specific educational environment at the college) play the role of external (objective) factors. The saturation of this environment with elements of preparedness to continuous professional education and the environment's being focused on students' mastery of new technologies aimed at enhancing and ensuring the activity-oriented nature of the educational process are the vital objective and subjective factors of students' and teaching staff's preparedness to continuous professional education.
One can maintain with certainty that the systemic characteristic of a person, the totality of his or her attitude, is the key to continuous professional education and the training of a theater and arts employee as a subject of activity. The systemic approach presupposes viewing a person as an integrated multilevel reality, permitting each person to be viewed as a system of the functioning of one's professional qualities, properties and statuses, as the unity of its behavioral, emotional and intellectual processes. In the process of the survey aimed at eliciting the organizational and pedagogical conditions of continuous professional education and training for theater and arts employees, we single out the following things as the top priorities: theater and arts employees' preparedness for continuous professional education and training at a specialized educational institution (92%); creation of an educational environment stimulating innovative development and fostering the training of competitive specialists prepared for continuous education (85%); the realization of successive principal professional educational programs, supplementary professional educational programs, and specialized professional training programs with the utilization of modern training methods and technologies, including state-of-the-art information technologies (68%); the development and testing of methods for developing the supplementary professional education
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programs, and professional training of workers and mid-level executives for the theater and arts field (59%).
Proceeding from the understanding of the phenomenon of student preparedness for continuous education as a result of training, we have singled out the following levels: motivational, personal, cognitive and pragmatic. In the process of realization of the educational course, we selected technologies aimed at forming students' preparedness for continuous education and training of theater and arts employees at the college. Within the framework of the educational course, we used such professionally oriented technologies as the technologies for organizing student project activities, problem-oriented training technologies (problem-oriented lecturing, heuristic methods, training and research activity technologies), the technologies of routine and solution of problematic requests, and the portfolio technology. In the process of their studies, students fulfilled various functional tasks connected with the choice of the optimum skills and methods for their fulfillment, and also carried out training project planning. As an extra-curricular activity, the students took part in performances staged by Moscow theatrical entertainment organizations and enterprises, as well as at the college training theater and multimedia cinema hall.
In the process of development and testing of the methods for developing the supplementary professional education and professional training programs, we took into account the demands of the program originators - the employers, applicants and students within the logic of the Federal State Educational Standard and the new Federal Law on Education. The items listed above permitted us: (a) to ensure creation of programs according to individual educational trajectories; (b) to train skilled employees to fit the requests of specific employers; (c) to introduce into supplementary professional education programs additional general and professional competencies that are in demand by both the job market representatives and the trainees in the region in question.
Translated from Russian by Znanije Central Translations Bureau
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