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THE AXIOLOGICAL ASPECT OF PEDAGOGICAL ACTIVITIES
M. A. Maksumova
G. A. Parmonova
The shaping of students' professional and axiological orientations is an important task of professional education. At the present stage in the development of society, a humanistic worldview by which a person must be guided in his or her activities becomes especially significant. A pedagogue as a professional actor is the bearer of the humanistic axiological bases of society and his or her profession. In the process of shaping a pedagogue's professional competence, the axiological orientations of a pedagogue act as the motivating forces of his or her personal development. The study of the axiological aspects of pedagogical activity demonstrates its content based on pedagogical values. As norms regulating a pedagogue's professional activities, their aggregate is holistic. It acts as a cognitive-active system determining relationships between the customary outlook on the problems of professional education and the peculiar features of a specialist's activities.
To ensure the adequacy of a pedagogue's axiological orientations toward the professional standards, his or her axiological system must be humanistic content-wise and the regulation method should be axiological, i.e. profoundly personal. Therefore, a pedagogue's professional competence must be based on a humanistic, professional, and personal axiological orientation that can be regarded as his or her focus on humanistic social ideals, principles and norms.
For historical reasons, the components of professional axiological orientations in the pedagogical activities are deeply rooted in the social lifestyle, in the system of national traditions distinguished by humanism and the uniqueness accumulated by our ancestors. Its emergence and development are connected with the ideological bases of social life that are reflected in philosophical and pedagogical works. I.F. Isayev has made a significant contribution to the analysis of the problem of values in pedagogical activities. In light of the fact that pedagogical values, being the condition and the result of their respective activities, have various existence levels, his study elicits two planes: the vertical one, represented by socio-pedagogical, professional (group-wide) and individual (personal) values, and the horizontal one, formed by the values being goals, means, knowledge, relationships, and qualities. As the proposed scheme focuses one's attention on the part-to-whole ratio, it touches upon important problems of organizing a system of higher educational training connected with eliciting the dominant axiological function and with determining the in-depth structure of each group of values, including those related to a pedagogue's professional training.
It must be noted that the concept of humanism acts as a substantive characteristic of the whole social system of relations building in modern society. In a broad sense, humanism amounts to the ideas of humanity and love for mankind; it is a doctrine which views human beings as the supreme value and the end in itself of social development. Therefore, it is necessary to analyze the composition of the value groups of socio-pedagogic activities on the basis of their humanistic
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orientation. The quality of pedagogical activities is determined by the goal which manifests itself in the content, methods and techniques used in reaching the necessary result. The goal reflects the tendency in development of social needs, manifests itself in the social policy of the state and determines the orientation of a social pedagogue's activities.
The extent to which a student adopts humanistic values depends on the activity of his or her pedagogical conscience, since the value of specific pedagogical ideas or pedagogical phenomena is established in the process of its assessment. The humanistic values of knowledge are a standard model. The behavior and activities of a pedagogue are, on one hand, constructed and, on the other hand, evaluated on the basis of comparison.
When we construct a system of knowledge as the basis for axiological orientations of a pedagogue, we must proceed from the following methodological points: a) the model of transformation of scientific knowledge into a specialist's personal consciousness is based on the reflexive process of comprehension, understanding and acceptance of the information world by a social pedagogue whose pedagogical knowledge is actually the reflection of pedagogical reality in the pedagogue's consciousness, as a subject to object relationship, as a certain system of perceptions, concepts and judgments recording the manifestations of pedagogical actuality; and b) the pedagogue's mastering of fundamental professional pedagogical knowledge creates a foundation for creativity and permits one to conceive and create one's own constructs of activities in order to understand their intrinsic logic.
On the basis of an analysis of pedagogical studies, we can elicit the following aggregate of socio-pedagogical knowledge that is necessary in a pedagogue's activities: a) the legal framework of a pedagogue's activities b) historico-pedagogical knowledge about the pedagogical education, including the theory and practice of social pedagogics; and c) the methodology and technology of socio-pedagogical activity. However, knowledge must be the earnest convictions of specialists in order to be efficient. Individual professional pedagogical experience and the sensations connected with it -- convictions, professional ties and relationships -- comprise a pedagogue's professional self. Being a system of convictions, judgments and knowledge about one's activities, oneself, other persons and society, pedagogical consciousness is at the same time the result of exclusively individual experience and a special mechanism for professional formation of a pedagogue's personality.
Translated from Russian by Znanije Central Translations Bureau
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