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4Pedagogy
UDC:378.4
candidate of Pedagogical Sciences, Associate Professor Maslennikova Nadezhda Nikolaevna
Kazan Federal University (Kazan)
PROBLEMS OF FORMING PROFESSIONAL META-QUALIFICATION OF FUTURE ENGINEERS
Annotation. The modern educational system is the most important factor in the country's social, economic, scientific and technical development, and therefore is called upon to focus on the formation of a specialist with a metaqualification. This requirement is especially relevant for future engineers, whose future professional activity is expected to minimize the destructive impact on nature. Therefore, it is necessary to form and develop environmentally oriented professional competencies at students of technical specialties. This process is becoming more effective when strengthening the practical component of ecological training for students of a technical profile and is achieved by introducing such forms and methods of instruction as the study of technical projects and scientific articles in the subject area (using the method of diversionary analysis), the participation of students in the work of scientific departments of enterprises, in eco-oriented industrial practice and interdisciplinary design. The results of the conducted experiment show the positive dynamics in the change of the formation levels of the main (significant for the given study) characteristics of the students' ecological culture and confirm the effectiveness of introducing the considered forms and methods into the process of future engineers' training with the aim of forming the foundations for professional meta-qualification.
Keywords: ecological training in the university, ecological culture, future engineer, technosphere, metaqualification.
Introduction. The beginning of the XX century is marked by the transition of the society to a new form of existence and development - the information society. This process is a logical result of scientific and technological progress and is characterized by the global changes in the production. It also affects the science: it becomes the main factor in the society development and the main "production" of high-quality information [14]. This leads to an increase in the proportion of mental work and, accordingly, to higher requirements for graduates of higher educational institutions. Their qualification, according to P. Drucker, begins to act as «determining factor of the existence or destruction of» firms [4, p. 143]; exactly those who come to the workplaces in the region' economy, will become the factors of ensuring its sustainable development.
However, knowledge is a special resource. The knowledge necessary for a specialist at a given time to solve a particular problem is impossible to find in the books or report in a higher educational establishment. You can find in the books, and in the educational institutions you can master only certain information, but not knowledge. Knowledge is the ability of a specialist to find application of this or that information in the sphere of his professional activity.
In accordance with this, the requirements to the education system are increasing, as it acts as the main medium for the reproduction of highly qualified personnel and becomes an important factor in the country's social, economic, scientific and technological development. Therefore, now it's not required the reporting learning of narrow professional information to the future specialist and the awarding of certain qualification, but the education is the formation of a specialist with metaqualification. By metaqualification, we mean a system of knowledge that allows the assimilation of new knowledge, as well as the ability to find and apply new information that is necessary at a given time, even if it is beyond the personal experience of its bearer.
Especially relevant is the matter concerning future engineers. It is explained by the fact that the society's development is no longer possible without technical progress and transformation of the natural environment. However, intensive development of the technosphere leads to a person who loses the control functions over the expanding technical reality, and the ecological situation continues to get worse. Therefore, the further stable and conditionally safe development of society depends on as far as activity of experts of a technical profile will correspond at the same time to indicators of the social and ecological acceptability; how the technology that they create will be compatible with the laws of the development of the biological world. In this regard, increased requirements are imposed for the graduates of engineering specialties of higher education institutions, but not so much to a high level of their environmental and social-ecological knowledge, but to the ability and desire to implement an environmentally-oriented professional activity at their workplace. So, the activity of future engineers transfers into the category of social values in the information society. Then, the process of environmental training of students of technical specialties of higher educational institutions, directed to the formation of readiness at future specialist to carry out the professional activity, connected with the design of new equipment and technology, in accordance with modern sociocultural and environmental standards, can be considered as a process aimed at forming his metaqualification.
Elements of display of this function at a future engineer in the context of his environmental training can be considered:
1) actualization of ecological culture in professional activity [13, p. 37];
2) ability to predict consequences of their possible impact on balance in ecological systems when designing of the equipment and technologies, to assess the extent of this impact, as well as to take into account the results of the forecast and assessment in correction of their activity.
The maximum stimulation of their cogitative and operational activity in educational process will promote to the formation of basic skills of future engineers metaqualification. Therefore, the purpose of the study was to find and justify the strengthening possibilities of the practical component in the environmental training of technical students.
The realization of this goal was seen in the strengthening of the following areas of activity of future engineers and was expressed in the formation of their skills: to carry out the mental design of the results of one's own activity (for the newly developed technical facilities) and to estimate them from positions of the social importance and compliance to ecological laws; to assess the results of professional activities (for the put into operation equipment and technologies) regarding the depth of their influence on the environment; to carry out environmental assessment of engineering projects.
Experimental and research work was carried out using a set of methods: literature analysis; the author's complex of diagnostic methods for determining the levels of component formation of the students' ecological culture; analysis of projects of the Olympiads' participants and students' reports on an externship; the experiment aimed at
modernizing of the environmental training of future engineers; analytical and synthetic methods of processing and interpreting the results of the experiment.
Main part. Elements of the metaqualification of the future engineer are able to make up the constituent parts of his ecological culture - education, which is regarded by the researchers as a certain type of cultural reflection that had emerged in the era of modernization and growth of the world population, when more and more growing needs of mankind began to contradict the deterioration of the quality of the natural environment [3].
To identify the components of the graduate's ecological culture, capable to become elements of his metaqualification, it is necessary to analyze its structure. This is also required by the pedagogical category "formation", regarded as a process of conscious management of the person's development or individual aspects of his personality, qualities, properties, and bringing them to the intended form [11, p. 60]. Therefore, the process of structure formation of ecological culture is impossible without its detailing - as the process of bringing of its certain components and their characteristics to the "conceived" form of a teacher.
The works by E.V. Muravyova maximally bring closer to the establishing the structure of the ecological culture of future engineer. Ecological culture is considered there as a new stage in the development of human culture, including ecological thinking, ecological world outlook, ecological consciousness together with universal human values and ideals, humanistic ideas, methods of cognition and activity, moral and environmental standards and requirements that together contribute to the formation of nature-creative attitude towards the world [8, p. 8]. This definition and the works of other researchers in the field of environmental education [1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9, l0, 12] have allowed us to structure the concept of "ecological culture" and distinguish three components:
1) cognitive (the synthesis of professional and environmental knowledge with the formation of eco-oriented professional over-knowledge, new in quality);
2) value-oriented (moral and personal qualities defining the readiness of a future engineer:
- carry out mental and operational activity in conditions of insufficient information and risk in implementing an innovative approach to the solution of the arising production problems;
- be responsible for its consequences);
3) activity (skills and activities aimed at designing the results of engineering activities on the natural environment, assessing the environmental consequences of this activity, examination of the correspondence of professional activities to the conditions of sustainable development of nature and society).
Thus, all components of the environmental culture of the future engineer will be able to become the components of his metaqualification.
Unfortunately, the ecological culture of many graduates- engineers continues to be characterized by anthropocentrism. This is confirmed by the experiment that we had conducted for three years (2010, 2013, 2016) with the participation of 1984 students studying in engineering and technical specialties of the universities (Kazan National Research Technical University named after A.N. Tupolev, Naberezhnye Chelny Institute of the Kazan Federal University, Kazan State Energy University, Udmurt State Technical University).
Briefly, the results of the research can be presented as follows:
- 69% of students are not ready to show either personal or collective activity in the prevention of ecological disasters;
- 61% of respondents do not have confidence in the possibility of personal solutions of ecological problems;
- 73% of future engineers are ready to ignore the facts of negative impact on nature in their activities;
- 64% of students have passive-consumer attitude towards nature and its resources;
- 78% of respondents have never done anything to solve ecological problems; among the models of possible behavior, most of them see their participation in work of the city's improvement.
The annual participation in the work of the commission of the All-Russian Students' Competition of Ecological Projects (2008-2018) allows us to state the insufficient formation of future engineers the ability to design their research activities, to assess the impact on the nature of equipment and technologies before and after implementing the environmentally-oriented measures. In 2013 the commission has been forced to exclude from the requirements to projects the formulation of hypotheses in them because of the complexity of its development by the contestants. Only 61.6% of the projects contained a successfully developed methodological base for the study; 63.4% of the projects had formally formulated obviously impracticable goals and objectives, which explained the inability of the executors to model mentally their activities and predict its results.
These characteristics do not correspond to the metaqualification of a future engineer with its focus on nature conformable professional activity.
Partial solution of this problem we see in the strengthening of the practical component of environmental training of students.
The change of the form and content of this process was carried out in the following directions:
1. Inclusion in the content of practical training of analytical work on the study of: scientific magazine articles in the field of ecological safety. The goal is to identify and analyze in detail the factors that triggered the accident with environmental consequences, the search for hypotheses to prevent them; real technical or technological projects. The purpose is to assess their ecological compatibility (implementation of environmental assessment).
2. Introduction of the method of the diversionary analysis to the practice of studying, which makes it possible to predict undesirable phenomena on the basis of identifying weaknesses in the analyzed object. A teacher initiates the students' thinking activity with questions: "How can the activity of this object be disturbed?", "How to provoke the occurrence of the greatest number of ecological dangers on it?", "How it is possible to realize the emergence of [such] undesirable ecological event on this object?" The purpose of the method is to develop professional thinking among students, since profound professional knowledge and skills of technical creativity are necessary for the "diversion" organization.
3. Inclusion of students in the work of scientific departments of industrial enterprises (for example, OGPD "Prikamneft", JSC "PO ELAZ", LLC SOLLERS-Elabuga). The purpose is to unite the scientific potential of higher education institution in the person of future engineers and administration of the industrial enterprises for the solution of real technical environmental problems of the region.
4. Organization of environmentally-oriented undergraduate industrial practice, since the study of ecological problems of the technosphere is impossible without students' acquaintance with its elements. Practice materials allow students to draw up in the reports a passport of ecological compatibility of equipment, technological processes and enterprises in general. The goal is the formation of skills to conduct primary environmental expertise of projects.
5. Development of an ecologically-oriented graduate project based on the materials of pre-diploma practice (at the request of the student).
The experiment with introduction of the discussed directions of strengthening the practical component of ecological training for technical students was carried out within 7 years (2011-2017). The base of the experiment was the Naberezhnye Chelny Institute of the Kazan Federal University; the total number of participants was 289 students.
The level determination of activity of students' ecological position and the formation of the activity component of their environmental culture ,as the main components of their metaqualification, were carried out on the results of the analysis of thematic articles, the equipment and technology examination, reports on pre-diploma practice, preparation and protection of ecologically-oriented projects, the students' involvement in the activities of scientific departments of industrial enterprises.
The processing of the results of the study showed the following changes in the experimental groups (in comparison with data of the stating experiment):
- at 79% of the respondents, the will component was reflected in concrete actions; they had a vision of solving environmental problems;
- 81% of students have mastered the ways of transferring environmental knowledge to real or projected activities (for example, ecological paint and varnish covering has been developed for settlers of drinking water, a project for processing glass waste into foam glass was created, etc.);
- 78% of future specialists were able not only to provide an environmental assessment of their own project, but also to analyze the environmental expertise of existing projects and identify shortcomings in them;
- 92% of students who had carried out ecologically-oriented diploma projects, found the ability to model mentally their activity and predict its results. This ability, in particular, was reflected in the formulation of specific hypotheses and the objectives of educational researches.
The results of the conducted experiment on modernization of the process of ecological preparation of students of technical specialties make it possible to note that representatives of experimental groups have formed:
- understanding of the social importance of engineering and environmental activities and responsibility for the results of their work;
- experience in predicting the consequences of technical decisions taken at the level of individual elements of the technosphere;
- the ability to connect environmental knowledge with future professional activities, carry out elementary procedures for environmental assessment, design innovative technical facilities.
In addition, students who worked on the experimental program were distinguished by the variability and goal-rationality of cognitive activity, by their own vision of the essence of environmental problems, the ability to predict their development and give recommendations on reducing their negative impact. And since these characteristics that we had distinguished earlier as the signs of a specialist's metaqualification, we can assume that in the course of the experiment its foundations were successfully laid.
Statistical indicators confirmed the truth, and the duration of the experiment - the reproducibility of the received results.
Summary:
1. One of the factors of sustainable development of modern society is becoming professional engineering activity, since it can provide compatibility of elements of a technosphere with laws of development of the biological world. This, respectively, guides the process of training future engineers to form metaqualification, including the ability and readiness to realize themselves in the environmentally-oriented professional activities.
2. Formation of the metaqualification of the future engineer is considered in the dialectical unity with the formation of his ecological culture.
3. The effectiveness of the process of forming the ecological culture of the future engineer will increase in case of strengthening of the practical component of the process of his environmental training.
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