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THE PERSONAL POSITION
OF THE UNIVERSITY TEACHER
IN CONTINUOUS PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION
М. N. Frolovskaya
The problem of adult continuous education is updated in the article with understanding the need for creating conditions for self-discovery, self-development, and forming of one's personal professional position. Humanitarian practices of interaction with the trainees at improvement qualification courses are discussed. Changing the position of "master" and "slave" in dialogical forms of training allows the participants clarifying values and meanings, rethinking of their own activities, and building the trajectory of selfdevelopment.
Key words: continuous adult education, humanitarian practice, creative studio, determination.
Continuous education as a method of forming man’s image in culture and the image of culture in man targets man’s internal spheres and, according to M.K. Mamardashvili, arouses in him “troublesome self-consciousness and personal surprise” at his own complexity, inconsistency, and desire to transform oneself.
H. Hesse was obsessed with the idea of finding himself on “the way inside”; he felt that every person must descend into his innermost depths before he really becomes an individual. At first people acquire maturity and the feeling of responsibility, and then think about rearrangement of the world [2]. V.P. Zinchenko tried to convince us that creation of man’s image, and identification of his development horizon, is the task of both “pedagogical alchemy” and man’s own choice. In this connection, continuous education of the 21st century may be called, according to C. Rogers, man-centered education. One should keep in mind that “self-discovery” is never limited by internal rules only. “Coming to oneself” means finding oneself in the world, learning the great art of being a man, and living among men without sacrificing one’s own substance.
Formation of the personal position of a university teacher is a condition of forming the student’s professional position, and is related to the development of the teacher’s attitude to himself, the Other one, and to the pedagogical process. Its most significant manifestations may be said to include the teacher’s ability to interact with the Other one, to weigh one’s actions with students, colleagues, and to be able to live together. This requires understanding and acceptance of oneself with the available experience of activities, but to move further one primarily needs to single out the conceptual gap between the teacher himself and his activities. G.S. Batishchev metaphorically writes about the birth of internal motivation and self-development: “... each of us has his own time of awakening and transition to the concentrated way of being. It sometimes comes very very early and sometimes bitterly late. But once the time comes, we are overpowered by the strongest feeling of dissatisfaction with any sluggishness and stagnation: the soul is firmly resolved to ward off the chains and bonds of routine-repetitive existence. From this moment, man no longer accepts the sluggish sameness and self-pressure of unawakened pseudo-life - he is stifled and breaks away from it - to be born for his own life as a
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constant forward flow laying new and renewable shores” [1, p. 103]. It is by the internal need for finding the meaning in the profession that the teacher identifies the prospects of his movement in development, realizes and fulfills his potential. How should we organize the adult education process focused on forming one’s professional’s personal position? The answer is obvious: in joint activities personally significant for everybody.
The Center for Professional Advancement and Personnel Retraining at the Altai State University attempts to organize adult education in the context of pedagogics of understanding [3]. Hence the need for creating situations of apprehension of own personal professional position by every participant through involvement of humanitarian strategies of understanding in the activities. First and foremost, this is analysis and apprehension of the available experience and professional results. Different forms are offered: (a) preparation of a presentation of the experience of “Acting now - building the future”: (b) writing an essay on “My professional image of the world”; (c) making up a collage on “Values of my professional activities”, etc. Then the ways of overcoming the detected barriers and methods of development are identified. This stage is organized in small groups where everybody introduces his/her own proposals in the collective project.
One of the active technologies designed to form the author’s position of immediate participants of the pedagogical process is the creative workshop. This is understood as a technology aimed at “immersion” of the participants in the process of search, cognition and self-cognition, built as a chain of assignments offered to the participants. Such “immersion” is possible in dialogical interaction, and active position of the participants. The facilitating teacher (moderator) must create an atmosphere of openness, trust, and candour to move to the position of partnership with the course participants, to maintain an intrigue, and paradoxicalness of the proposed material, to use the assignment with a certain degree of uncertainty, to minimize assessments giving preference to the participants’ self-appraisal, to be equally attentive both to the process and the results of the action. These are the pedagogical conditions of the workshop.
What is the essence of a creative workshop? This is most likely creation of a specially organized developing space which enables the participants in a collective search to come to building (“discovery”) of knowledge, and apprehension of values. As a result, the participants are given the initiative in searching for and building their own knowledge. The specific feature of the technology is determined by several factors:
Firstly, the dialogue mode. The relations of the participants have a mutually developing character; therefore, the workshop has a “bilateral” effect. Everybody learns everything, and everybody learns from everybody. The participant has the possibility of choosing the place, partner, material, ideas, means, content, and ways of proposed activities;
Secondly, improvisational character. The variability of actions is created due to some uncertainty of wording of assignments, a low degree of regulation of actions, and potential multivariance;
Thirdly, diagnostic potential. The participants’ activities at different stages are recorded on paper; therefore, there is a possibility for self-analysis and selfdiagnosis in one’s work;
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Fourthly, learning different types of analysis (emotional, intellectual, communicative, cooperative).
The workshop is a sequence of steps-assignments built according to a certain logic: (a) demonstration of one’s attitude to the topic; (b) reference to personal experience; (c) reference to Others’ experience also presented by means of various materials (scientific, journalistic, fiction); (d) comparison of the experience of an individual and group so as to note the possible inconsistence of these experiences, limitation of the personal experience, and to encourage the participants to apprehend, correct and improve their actions. The workshop launches the process of understanding, but it has no completion in principle. It presupposes further independent work of its participants; the feeling of the beginning of the way is created.
The principal units of the workshop can be presented as the movement “from oneself - to oneself”. They include: induction (creation of an emotional attitude of mind at the beginning of actions, motivation, and incentive for cognitive activities and interest); self-construction (individual creation of a text, hypothesis, solution, drawing); socialization (presentation of the “product” of the creative work, learning the results of others’ creative work, discussion, comments); self-correction (rework/specification of the initial material); reflexion (reflection of the feelings, sensations arising in the participants of the workshop). Alternation of different forms of interaction results in rethinking of habitual ideas and views. At every stage, different elements of understanding interaction can be used: different means, forms of performance of the assignment: action.
The workshop makes it possible to solve different tasks and perform different actions, accordingly: (a) associative (building associations based on similarity, difference, sound...); (b) linguistic (work with words, with every letter of the word, its etymology); (c) symbolic (building symbols, images, schemes, and conventional representations); (d) situational (proposals for a way out); (e) problem-related (assignments to expand certain problems); (f) inversion (tasks with actions “by contradiction”, “the opposite way” view); (g) heuristic (tasks for generation of heuristic hypotheses, suppositions). As a result of the creative workshop, a certain product of activities is generated, a certain result after which the participant can move to the next step. The central place is given to speech activities: oral communication and reading and written assignments promote creation of a dialogue. Written texts record the translation of “internal speech” for oneself into an extensive executed text for others (L.S. Vygotsky). Such work enables the workshop participant to see the change in his ideas on the topic being discussed. The internal result is certainly determined by the goals and values of every person. Apprehension of one’s own result of the work in the workshop generally occurs at the reflexion stage when there is the possibility and need to see oneself, one’s promotion, and dynamics of the state throughout creative activities.
The dialogical interactive forms of interpersonal professional communication facilitate manifestation of the author’s position, which is also evidenced by the words of the participants of extended education: “The meeting organized at the Center is a possibility for each of us to discover new pedagogical ideas and approaches, to rethink some life values”; “The program gave us additional incentives for further personal and professional growth”; “The discussion of the
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problems of the pedagogical position helped each of us to understand oneself in the system of professional relations...”
Extended education of a university teacher focused on his rethinking of his own pedagogical position and built in line with the humanitarian practices of interaction promotes manifestation of the students’ own position regarding the problem being discussed, their fellow students, and the teacher. In this case the Center for Professional Advancement becomes a center of continuous education where the moderator of the courses implements the position of a facilitator (assistant), and where a single informal collective exists where everybody learns from everybody and where the professional’s personal position is “raised”.
References
1. Батищев Г. С. Диалектика общения. Гносеологические и мировоззренческие проблемы. - М.: Наука, 1987.
2. Гессе Г. Письма по кругу: пер. с нем. / сост. и автор предисловия, комментариев В.Д. Седельников. - М.: Прогресс, 1987. - 400 с.
3. Сенько Ю. В., Фроловская М.Н. Педагогика понимания: учебное пособие. 2-ое изд., стереотип. - М.: Дрофа, 2008. - 189 с.
4. Технологии образования взрослых / под общ. ред. О.В. Агаповой, С.Г. Вершловского, Н. А. Тоскиной. - СПб.: КАРО, 2008. - 176 с.
The paper has been prepared at the Altai State University with the financial support of the RHSF (grant No.13-06-00010, project type “a”).
Translated from Russian by Znanije Central Translastions Bureas
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