KEYWORDS: sociocultural factors, cultural practices, professional field practice, independent work, self-organization, undergraduate teacher education.

ABSTRACT: The influence of sociocultural factors on the process of teachers’ professional training is represented in this article. The authors show that undergraduate students’ self-organization is one of the forms of their cultural field practices. The necessity of a combination of a new type of university instruction and independent studies is emphasized and explained. The importance of a university instructor’s example as a motivational factor for students’ self-organization is clearly represented. The authors provide a number of recommendations of how to improve instruction and make teachers’ education more effective and advanced. This paper is a logical continuation of the work published in the same journal in 2014; see:

http://www.rus-ameeduforum.com/content/en/?task=aut&aut=2000194&iid=19

Introduction

Traditionally, the concept of teachers’ training is connected with the idea of professional higher education. Currently this situation is changing due to a number of new curriculum standards and the necessity to develop certain competencies together with just passing along knowledge and mastering certain skills. It is presupposed that after acquiring the necessary competencies a bearer of an undergraduate degree will be able to work independently in the field of school education. However, the question arises, how to develop such competencies? And whether a traditional education system is oriented towards this process?

Naturally, competencies will become the result of students’ cognitive activities. As we all know, there are certain educational maxims: teaching is a specially organized and goal-oriented process operated by a teacher; teaching is an interconnected and interdependent activity of a teacher and learners; and finally, the process of teaching is closely connected with the cognition process. The latter is especially important for us. From the philosophical point of view, cognition is a set of processes, procedures, and methods of knowledge acquisition. Therefore teaching can be considered one of special cases of the knowledge acquisition process. Misunderstanding of the essence of this process leads to errors in the interaction between an undergraduate student and his/her instructor. To organize a productive instruction process, which will allow to develop a successful teacher, demands a clear understanding of conditions and regularities of knowledge acquisition together with a no less clear comprehension of the existing connections between cognitive and practical activities.

In this respect, we can generalize undergraduate students’ training in terms of “anthropo-practical activities” which include personal professional cultural field practices.

The influence of external factors on the teaching process at the undergraduate level

Today, university faculty members are facing a demand to upgrade and modernize their syllabi and evaluation processes while teaching undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral students.  This happens due to a number of quite objective circumstances:

In the first place, professional education today is undergoing a serious influence of such socio-cultural factors as availability of world education for all, globalization of education, and a more and more strengthening tendency towards academic mobility and an increasing volume and importance of students’ independent work. In this concern it is also necessary to mention the Bologna Process.

Secondly, in our digital era with its more virtual than personal communication processes many students prefer to acquire knowledge and deal with their self-development without addressing their teachers directly, so that an instructor is no longer considered a unique source of education. Such radical changes in the society impose increased requirements on current and future teachers whose professional formation is happening at a university setting. Current trends towards the development of future teachers’ professional competences should change and improve strategies and methods used in their teaching process. We consider these micro-factors.

Thirdly, such traditional factors as reference groups, organizational cultures of educational institutions, companies, and different city social establishments also produce an impact on an undergraduate education, giving students more opportunities for their cultural and professional trials and errors, and various forms and types of activities.

Finally, current (and recent) state curriculum standards clearly declare the necessity of preparing undergraduate students for independent professional activities, including the ability to participate in projects and to conduct research.

In summary, we have all the reasons to conclude that today’s young people are oriented towards maximizing their self-development in concern of their studies, pre-professional self-determination and professional formation.

Cultural practice of self-organization as a basis of competences formation

Cultural practice of self-organization is a goal-oriented activity directed towards the creation of terms and conditions of an individual development. In its essence, this practice helps to create a genuine human being. Cultural practice of self-organization consists of learning, understanding, and transforming the individual variability of objective reality. In our case we are talking about a specific professional, educational environment [3].

Professional activities of university faculty can produce an influence only on the conditions of how future teachers will be shaped. We cannot influence their self-organization and their development, but we can help to initiate these processes.

If we manage to teach undergraduate students how to use these conditions for promoting their own self-organization, then we will achieve some positive results. Otherwise, their self-organization won't happen and … is not happening.

There comes the problem of finding theoretical and methodological foundations for developing syllabi and forms of individual learners’ evaluation. We are also facing the necessity to maximize students’ abilities to work independently in university classrooms, school settings, and elsewhere [2, 5].

However, the following logic of the necessary competences’ formation at the undergraduate level is not taken into consideration:

• Allocation and justification of the values-based individual strategies of professional development offered by the current system of education.
• Recognizing and understanding methods of scientific knowledge acquisition, project and research activity.
• Accepting laws and rules of logic.
• Choosing goals, means, ways, and forms of realization of certain research projects.
• Implementing professional field practices that allow to establish some professional experience.
• Reflecting on the consequences of one’s professional choice.
• Accepting/rejecting certain patterns of professional behavior.
• Repeating personal cultural professional field practices, a number of which should be individually tailored.
• Acquiring an internal freedom and a sense of responsibility for the results of one’s professional practices and behavior and acts on the basis of understanding and accepting main principles of educational activities.

As we see, the aforementioned logic is based on the process of knowledge acquisition that consists of several stages – feeling, perception, representation, formation of a concept, and its practical application. Thus, knowledge received should be applied in practice at every stage of its acquisition. Each time we should base new knowledge on what has already been taught.

In this respect, we consider that professional training of a future teacher is a process of cognition, which presupposes the creation of certain psychological and educational conditions in order to bring more effective ways of acquiring educational competencies.

Modernizing instruction in and out of university classrooms

After explaining the logic that we consider correct, we need to also change forms and methods of introducing new teaching materials because traditional strategies will not allow us to achieve the goals we have set. The main reason is the inability of young people to react properly to traditional lectures and seminars. In this respect a project, as a method, is much more preferable.

Our experience shows that undergraduate students are reacting, in a positive way, towards problem solving situations, problem-orientated teaching materials, case studies, and discussions within the group. For example, we are used to applying methods of problem teaching and project teaching at our lectures. During the seminars we use role-playing and individual projects. We try to help every student to develop his/her individual educational trajectory that motivates students towards research activities.

Since new syllabi presuppose a considerable increase of hours for independent studies, we recommend different strategies for organizing these studies, realizing individual educational trajectories, research-based and problem-solving strategies, and methods of developing reflective abilities.

In this situation, instructors need to change the form of presenting assignments to students. They should be more orientated towards values and for the search for meanings.

We do foresee difficulties in this process since traditionally university instructors were always orientated towards delivering lectures-monologues, and very often just reading these lectures from their notes. We don’t hold them guilty for this as university textbooks in the Theory of Education would teach that knowledge and methods of activities should be “put” into the heads of learners. So university instructors would take this idea literally — trying to put in more and more instead of developing and allowing students to be independent. There has always been a system of methods of instruction and a system of methods of character shaping, but there has never been a system of methods for how to develop students!

Until today, an image of a university instructor-lecturer, which in Russian literally means “reading lectures” is dominating over the image of an instructor-tutor, a person who is thinking out loud and sharing his thoughts with his/her students. So it is no wonder that field practice is usually set around fulfilling certain home assignments and giving trivial advice of how to organize the process of learning at home and preparing for exams. The scheme of setting the development process for a student is usually put in the lecture – seminar logic, and it rarely includes elements of research activities [1].

But a new approach to university education, which is oriented towards developing students’ competencies, has changed the situation dramatically. Now the psychological-educational accompaniment of students’ development and self-organizational practices should be oriented towards an individual learner. This by itself demands a different attitude towards formulating assignments for independent students’ work and different forms of its evaluation.

For example, when we see that tasks for individual work demand an answer in the form of a monologue, then the evaluation process would mean to establish the volume and the corrected-ness of the facts that students have to reproduce: “Academic mobility of students: essence and content”; “The forms of organizing academic mobility of students”; “International students’ mobility”, etc. Another assignment could be of the following type: “Compose a table with such columns as the title of the book, the author, and the publication year.” No doubt, this kind of assignment is not really valuable. What might become valuable is when an undergraduate student is asked to write a short annotation about the book [2].

Field practice: risks and perspectives of organization

Finally, the most important part of teaching future teachers is their field practice.  The process of preparation of bachelors is their teaching practice. It should be organized not only outside the classroom, but also in the instruction process [6: 7].

Traditionally, the dominant part of comparing professional teachers is set in the sphere of giving a lot of theory. In such a teaching process, students remain passive and do not acquire motives for mastering their profession. As a result, the level of learning strategically important methods remains low. This also results in the situation that students usually copy schoolteachers whom they observe during their field practice. This happens because these are the only teachers they could observe in an actual school setting and consequently adopted their style.

Arranging any activity happens through a number of different stages — goal setting, formation of motives, formation of meanings, and identification of conditions of a purposeful activity [4]. The initial unit of any activity is an individual learner’s action which consists of a certain number of operations, and learners develop primarily while being active and quite often in a joint activity with their university instructor. This is why it is necessary to reconsider and reconstruct the process of undergraduate education and use an activity approach as its foundation.

In such a situation, an instructor does not start with lectures but rather introduces his/her own experiences to the students.  He/she arranges master classes that allow the understanding of educational strategies used in the instruction process. Undergraduate students become active participants of their own teaching, receive an opportunity to analyze “master’s” strategies and either appreciate or reject them. The perception of such a process not only produces an impact on the development of students’ motivation but also on acquiring their teacher’s skills, and inspiring a more sophisticated learning process. 

The next stage is students’ mastering of theoretical knowledge and an independent preparation of a class and/or after-class activity. Discussing possible applicants allows the analysis of how students mastered their instructor’s strategies, which in turn will allow the improvement of future classes. This is one of the ways by which an undergraduate student can acquire both theoretical knowledge and also learn about the applied characteristics of his/her future profession. 

In the final stage of their field practice, future teachers should demonstrate how they have mastered professional competencies, and only after that, they should have an exam in the Theory of Education [6, 7]. This type of training of future teachers radically changes the structure of instruction and traditional approaches to undergraduate education.

Concluding remarks

In conclusion, we briefly summarize our suggestions that require the following steps:

To upgrade the schedule of an instruction process:

• Studying psychology should precede teaching the theory of education as its understanding is impossible without knowing psychological processes.
• Field practice should be started right from the beginning – the first undergraduate year: one day a week freshmen are obliged to spend with schoolchildren, observe classes, act whenever possible as their tutors, analyze their own observations and feelings.
• Teaching theory of education and pedagogy should be longer than now, for example, not during two semesters in a row with four hours per week but during four semesters with two hours per week. Moreover, it is necessary to study these classes not only before but also after field practices to give students an opportunity to formerly and thoroughly analyze their experience.

To change methods and strategies of delivering lectures, seminars, and self-regulating independent work of undergraduate students: 

• Lectures should start challenging students’ thinking, should be full of paradoxes and cases oriented towards problem solving.
• Seminars should be oriented towards creating new ideas and enriching students with new strategies and methods.
• Individual studies should become more productive in terms of the forthcoming professional activities and also personally fruitful.

To stop assignments of a reproductive character while preparing for seminars and/or fulfilling independent work: 

It is necessary to work out a system of assignments that will challenge students’ cognitive processes and benefit their future professional activities and in this regard it will also help to develop a number of necessary competencies. (In a certain sense the way a teacher is formulating an assignment shows whether he/she understands the very essence of his/her activity: it is an indicator whether the instructor is orienting the students towards just knowledge of his/her class or towards acquiring a number of the program-related competencies.)

To increase a number of classes

Oriented towards training undergraduate students in practical skills and preparing them for field practices, observing their afterschool activities and reflecting on them.

To modernize the way students are preparing their course works and capstone theses: 

• There should always be a few people working with the student versus one as it is happening now – we see the necessity to include consultants in the fields of psychology and pedagogy (the latter is necessary when the work is done in the field of methods of teaching a certain subject).
• The defense process of capstone theses should be public with inviting students from undergraduate classes, including freshmen, and also potential employers. For students this might become a meaningful learning experience.

References

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1 The research was conducted with support of The Russian Foundation for Humanities’ grant, Project No. 13-06-00704.