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QUALITY OF TEACHERS’ TRAINING AND THE PROFESSIONALISM OF THEIR WORK IN THE SYSTEM OF CONTINUOUS EDUCATION
PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT OF TEACHING STAFF IN THE FIELD OF HUMANITIES AS A BASIC TASK OF THEIR CONTINUOUS EDUCATION
A.S. Mishchenko,
V.I. Klyushkin
The urgency of studying the professional development of teaching staff in the field of humanities in the process of their continuous education is required because, apart from the evident crisis in Russian educational institutions, their social status and authority as viewed by Russian citizens is decreasing. This is evidenced by the Public Opinion Foundation (FOM) Surveys (Moscow, 2005-2008). In particular, they have shown that as a whole, the reputation of a teacher's profession in Russian society is not high. Only 27% of respondents think that present-day Russian teachers render a significant influence on children's outlook (rural people think so more frequently than others - 35%). One-third of the respondents (33%) think that this influence is insignificant, and approximately every fifth person (18%) denies modern teachers any such humanitarian influence on students' outlooks. The overwhelming majority of the respondents (86%) say that the present-day teachers have "removed themselves" from forming children's and adolescents' outlooks, social ideologies, and attitudes towards life. Only 7% of the respondents hold the opposite opinion. The quality ratings of teachers' work also might have been better: very often society assesses it as "satisfactory" (42% to 45%). "Good" and "excellent" marks (in total) are given by 29% to 33% of the respondents, and "bad" and "very bad", by 8% to 12% of the respondents. About 17% could not answer how instructors and teachers cope with their duties.1. In other words, the situation in which Russian teachers find themselves at present has forced social scientists to pay attention to the matters of their continuous professional education, and education in the humanities.
What do we think is the role of such continuous professional and liberal education in the development of teachers? First of all, it is connected with the development of teachers' competence in the sphere of the humanities. the competences of teachers working in ordinary schools, vocational schools and colleges in the sphere of humanities are a specific integral component of their teaching and upbringing activities linked to the socio-cultural (aesthetic, artistic, moral and spiritual) upbringing of the young generation. Competences in the sphere of the humanities are revealed as a specific kind of connecting link or bridge, a component ensuring interaction between teachers and students' personal, professional and civic attitudes. In one part, a teacher's humanitarian competences add special socio-cultural (basal)
1 The cited data are also confirmed by the results of our survey of elementary and secondary professional educational institutions in Saint Petersburg.
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features to the educational process, and in the other part, they can be viewed as specific lines of force and mechanisms of interaction and mutual alteration of teachers' personal, professional and civic characteristics in the process of their continuous education. Teachers' humanitarian competences are very closely associated with the functions of the educational and upbringing process (individualization, socialization, enculturation, as well as with the representative, correcting and diagnostic functions (according to V.I. Ginecinski), with specific kinds of teachers’ activities (according to
N.V. Kuzmina, with the Gnostic, projective, constructive, communicative, organizational and sense-forming activities). They are specific axiological subjects of the educational process. In our opinion, only teachers who are competent in the sphere of humanities can form students' values, senses and ideals efficiently. An instructor's or teacher's development in the sphere of humanities is revealed most prominently when he or she goes over from role-playing to professional and then to personal, pedagogically wise interaction with students. The wisdom of every teacher who is trained in the humanities is always active and practical. The strong side of a teacher who is indeed wise is a comprehensive cognition of his/her students' nature, will, interests and motivation. That is why his/her wisdom, in the positive sense of this word, is harmonious, axiological and ethical; it expresses his/her real elitism, his/her teaching and upbringing potential. It was such teachers that K.J. May, an outstanding 19th century educationist had in mind. In particular, he stated that a wise teacher proceeds from the comprehensive and systemic nature of his/her personal relationships with students: "an educator," May stated, "must know a person in the family, in society, in the midst of a nation, in the midst of mankind, alone with his or her conscience, in all ages, in all classes, in all situations, in joy and in sorrow, in splendor and in humiliation, in excess energy and in sickness" [1, p. 110]. In our opinion, this genesis of relationships between a teacher and his/her students is the principal humanitarian vector of the continuous development of his professional activities. In our opinion, it is not by chance that educational competences are of a human nature, and that their structure and content always include a specific axiological component. Thus, a teacher's realization of humanitarian competences is subjected to a specific logic of instrumental teaching and upbringing. This ensures the existence of subjectivity and processuality in a teacher's competences in the sphere of the humanities. As we think, in the process of analyzing teachers' humanities competences, one must proceed from the principle of centration, and their processuality, from a specific principle of reversibility.
Endless development is inherent in any competences, including educational ones: teachers' competences are infinitely developing elements of education. When one finds out their innovative essence, one must bear in mind that every innovation is not only a movement somewhere ahead, but a permanent turning back to one's previous state. As we think, every new phenomenon, state, property or quality of the educational process inevitably becomes a component of the basis of a teacher's professional activities, a basis for a new volute of its humanitarian progress. Reversing itself in the time continuum of educational action, such reversible logic of instrumentality forms cycles and volutes of his/her continuous development, and ensures the teachers' concentrations on the actual actions aimed at teaching and upbringing the younger generation. It permits one to elicit actual educational acts as a specific reality. Besides that, it also permits a teacher to reveal his/her own axiological and conceptual structures, the principles of students' formation and development as
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subjects of society, to act in conformity with the meaning of their education and upbringing process, and to develop their untold potential.
When we speak about teachers' competencies in the sphere of humanities, we mean that all links and interactions between the components of the educational process are established within the space of living interaction between teachers and students. In this case, students themselves become the center of the educational and upbringing process. Therefore, the difference between knowledge-oriented and competence-oriented paradigms of the educational process manifests itself most prominently. When the paradigm is knowledge-oriented, the main thing is to stress that a concept is a process, a specific route for thought, guided by the logic to move through things and their ontological links. A concept is a terminologically recorded and verbally expressed subject matter, the law of an objective process. In the competence-oriented paradigm of teacher training, the self-sufficient definition of an educational concept as a result (knowledge only), competence paradigm forces the subject of academic activity to discover and implement new opportunities for understanding the essence of the process of the younger generation’s education and upbringing, because the essence of this process is "exhausted not by its goal, but its realization" [2, p. 10, 11, 29, 54, 58-60, 65]. Teachers' humanities competences elicit themselves in their interpersonal interactions with students and fellow teachers. We view these interactions as the core elements of the educational and upbringing process, and we think the education of the younger generation must be filled with senses, values and ideals by virtue of its definition alone. When the educational process is organized in such a way, a teacher brings his or her students to a personal level of communication and learning, and the teacher's educational and upbringing activities are dementalized through specific words, gestures, intonations, through the teacher's position in the study room, etc.
In the "To Have" mode, a teacher's educational and upbringing activity is existentially elicited through the teacher's interest in the subject of conversation, not to the student's personality. In this case, a teacher, possibly without either noticing or wishing so, approaches a student as just a thing, degrading it to the level of an ordinary object. For a teacher, the student becomes identical to the volume of information about an object, being the theme of the adolescent's or young man's answer to the teacher's question. The teacher withdraws from the personal and axiological aspects of his/her interaction with the student, and he/she becomes identical to a registering device, a computer coldly testing its charge. In the "To Be" mode, other aspects of the educational process are important for a teacher: not only the student's knowledge, expertise and skills but his or her personality is well. The difference manifests itself in the teacher's attitude to the student, not only through the "right - wrong", "knows -does not know", "understands - does not understand", "can - cannot", but through a certain humanitarian assessment of the students (a thought may be not quite correct but its paradoxicality may be peculiar only to this student. The student's speech melody may be harmonious, his/her gestures artistic, and he/she may speak emotionally and sincerely, etc.). The teacher begins to view the student as a free, conscious being, at the level where the teacher him/herself can "answer" the student's question by his/her words and gestures, intonation and deeds. If such a situation can be realized, the students form a social space where their personal, professional and civic growing up takes place.
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In conclusion, we would like to make the following three statements. (1) Using the interdisciplinary approach for studying educational systems of continuous teacher training permits education at all levels to comprehensively fulfill its vital functions in respect of society, and society in respect of education: to transfer culture, social and social-professional relationships into educational environment, on one part, and to transmit meaningful messages about the life of teachers' community to the society as a whole, on the other part. (2)
Interdisciplinary analysis of continuous teacher training system development can be ensured in the most comprehensive way through: interaction between various sciences; a transfer of ideas and methods from one science into another, studying the development of educational reality as a complex system of intra-disciplinary and interdisciplinary interactions, interdisciplinary enrichment of educational practice, the education, upbringing and personal development of students and teachers. (3) Interdisciplinary synthesis of pedagogy, sociology, cultural studies and other scientific disciplines in the process of teachers’ training allows the enhancement of the efficiency and performance of continuous teacher training, to form necessary and sufficient conditions for the teachers' upbringing of the younger generation's spiritual requirements in the process of its enculturation, socialization and professionalization.
References
1. Белодубровский, Е. Дом на Васильевском. - Аврора, 1985. - № 11. - С. 109-114.
2. Ячин, В.С. Феноменология сознательной жизни: монография / В.С. Ячин. -Владивосток: Дальнаука, 1992. - 298 с.
Translated from Russian by Znanije Central Translations Bureau.
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