Self-Organization As The Universal Competence Of Specialists Of The Future

Abstract

The relevance of the issues addressed in the article is determined by the importance of organizing the dialogue between education and business to ensure the high quality of training specialists. Changes in requirements for the quality of vocational training of students in higher educational institutions, the humanization of goals and content of education put in the forefront the formation of the ability to self-organization. The relevance of the problem of self-organization, first of all, is related to the fact that it is the most important part of the humanitarian paradigm of the educational and professional process. The article presents the results of the survey of students of two civil higher educational institutions and one military school about difficulties arising in the formation of self-organization skills. The results of the study of the determinants of students' self-organization using “The self-organizing activity questionnaire” (SAO) are presented. Using the method of the correlation analysis the relationship between components of self-organization was revealed. According to the results of empirical research, conclusions were drawn on the need for self-organization to achieve success in various areas of professional activities. The article focuses on the fundamental non-linearity of self-organization processes and the crucial importance of self-control in the process of becoming the specialist of the future.

Keywords: Self-organizationprofessional activitieshigher educationhumanitarian paradigm

Introduction

At present, it is becoming obvious that the modernization of the labor market requires the actualization of both professional and personal potential of specialists. In this regard, the orientation of efforts towards understanding and acceptance of the goals and content of education by students, their inclusion in the process of educational and professional development is becoming the mechanism of real reforms in the field of higher education (Alexankov, Trostinskaya, & Pokrovskaia, 2018, Razinkina et al., 2018).

The image of the specialist of the future, prepared in a humanitarian paradigm, reflects a professional who is able to freely navigate in changing sociocultural circumstances, who is able to find a compromise between environmental requirements and individual needs and act responsibly in the conditions of solving life problems. Modernization of educational and professional activities requires a new understanding of the essence of the educational process, the value setting of which is the priority of individuality of thinking over like-mindedness, educational interests of the individual over the standard curriculum, subject-subject interaction of teachers and students over the directive transfer of ready-made knowledge (Gruzdev, Kasakova, Kuznetsova, & Tarkhanova, 2018).

All of the above allows us to determine the essence of the social order in the humanitarian educational paradigm of the specialist of the future: this is a professional ready for independent understanding and interpretation of production processes; capable to practicability, reasonableness, responsibility of actions in problematic situations; characterized by purposefulness of choice and combination of means, forms, positions, methods of professional activity; able to consciously influence the change in the situation in which this activity is carried out.

Self-organization is provided by the regulable conscious activity, focused on organizing and managing oneself to achieve the goals. As a result of the inclusion of internal mechanisms of self-organization (autonomy, independence, insistence, initiative, responsibility), the personality makes a choice of the optimal way of professional functioning and self-development, which is manifested in the desire to continue education, master the new in the profession, personal development (Ferris, Brown, Lian, & Keeping, 2009). The essential signs of self-organization in this situation are: controllability and initiative of the individual, independent participation, the coincidence of personal goals with the goals of the main activity, absorption in management activities, taking into account the person's moral virtues and external conditions of the main activity.

Problem Statement

A civilizational shift and innovations in the value-semantic space of education are fixed in modern specialist training. The probabilistic nature of social changes is a characteristic of the present; their randomness, the absence of rigid determinism, the non-linearity of educational processes lead to the fact that forecasting and staging of the didactics of higher school get a humanitarian focus.

Today, ideas of changing the anthropological ideal arise in the didactics, namely: the transition from the concept of “person capable” (action interpretation) to the concept “person possible” (humanitarian interpretation) (Popov, 2008).

Ivanova and Osmolovskaya (2009) connect the future of the didactics with the strengthening of the role of the student’s independent activities and the changing functions of the training process: “orienting, presentation, systematizing”. At the same time, the authors emphasize that the role of the teacher is changing significantly: the teacher helps the student to orient himself/herself in the information field, presents ways of working to achieve specific results, while working with the ideas already available to the students. The task of the teacher is to systematize these ideas, to train students in working with information, to design an information and educational environment.

European researchers are also looking for ways to modernize university education. So Haverhals (2007) proposes to consider education through the self-organization of students' scientific-research activities. He argues that active participation in scientific research really prepares future specialists for life in the modern dynamic society (Haverhals, 2007). Kösel and Scherer's (1996) “Subjective didactics” produces a special culture of self-organization, relying on multi-planning and competing patterns of behavior and thoughts, on the construction of students' knowledge in a problem environment.

Research Questions

In this manner, education is becoming a process when the student under the guidance of the teacher extracts and absorbs the new knowledge, examines facts and draws conclusions when he/she can manifest his/her own "I".

Thus, universities are faced with fundamentally new challenges: how to ensure the inclusion of students so that they don't banally intake knowledge, but self-reproduce it and how to diversify feedback?

Purpose of the Study

The study solved the problem of identifying the structure of the ability to self-organization and the presence of deficits that impede the formation of self-organization motivation of students not only in the training process, but also in the sphere of development of a new type of professionalism.

Research Methods

In the pedagogical community the point of view that is often expressed is that self-organization is brought up by discipline. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a survey of students of two civil universities and one military school. The military school was included in the study because of the emphasis in its educational environment on discipline and obedience to the requirements of the military regulations. In 2018, 172 students of three universities were surveyed: Yaroslavl State Pedagogical University named after K.D. Ushinsky, Kostroma State University and Yaroslavl Higher Military School of Air Defense. The students are future bachelors, 83 of them are trained in a closed and authoritarian military educational environment and 89 receive humanitarian education based on the formation of the future specialist’s subjectivity.

To assess the parameters and the actual level of students' self-organization, we used the method of studying the features of self-organization “The self-organizing activity questionnaire (SAO)” developed by Mandrikova (2010), designed to diagnose the formation of tactical planning skills and strategic goal-setting, features of self-organization structuring; it has high rates of reliability and validity.

Findings

The survey showed that students experience great difficulties in self-organization of their independent work.

It was found that the majority of the students (46%) spend on independent work from 2 to 3 hours on the average, and less (11%) – less than 1 hour. The students said that the most difficult thing in organizing independent work was the ability to force themselves to get to work and not to get distracted from doing it, this causes difficulties for 72% of the students of civil universities. The cadets identified this problem much less frequently, only 18% of the students of the military school indicated its presence, but this is due to the fact that in the cadets' daily routine time for independent work is allocated, and its implementation is controlled by officers, which makes it difficult to attribute the absence of this difficulty to evidence about a high level of self-organization skills.

A common difficulty for the students of civil higher educational institutions and for the students of the military school is the choice of sources of information for independent work. Most often, the students use compendium of lectures (52%), less often they use the library (17%). No significant differences between students of civil universities and cadets have been identified in this parameter.

Almost all the students unanimously answered the question "What determines the effectiveness of independent educational work" – "personal efforts" (92%). However, the central issue of this study was the question of the attitude of the students to independent work when the teacher assesses the readiness strictly. 72% of respondents indicated that they pay more attention to the preparation when the teacher strictly assesses the work.

The assessment of the total score of “The self-organizing activity questionnaire” revealed that the majority of the students (77.3%) show average values of self-organization. This demonstrates their ability to combine the structured approach to organizing the life time with spontaneity and flexibility, the ability to appreciate all the components of psychological time and to extract valuable experience from the diversity of their lives. Thus, the result of the formation of the competence of self-organization on the whole can be considered satisfactory, but in order to identify current deficits, a more detailed analysis of the obtained results according to the methodology scales is required.

On the scale "Regularity" the majority of students (62.4%) showed high scores. Low scores on this scale were not demonstrated. This shows the preferences to consistently achieve the goals and developed tactical planning skills.

On the scale “Purposefulness” most of the students (68.9%) gave average score, the rest showed low score, and high score on this scale was not recorded. This is a rather alarming symptom, which characterizes the graduates' lack of a clear vision of their goals, and a lack of ability to direct their activities towards the achievement of any clear goals. These results, in general, coincide with the results of our observations and confirm the conclusion about the students' readiness to act to achieve the tasks set outside, but their inability to independently determine goals, including training ones.

According to the scale “Insistence”, the majority of respondents (72.3%) showed good results, which shows their volitional power, their ability to structure their behavioral activities by force of will and complete work begun.

High scores were also obtained from the respondents on the scale “Fixation”, which testifies their diligence and commitment, but at the same time indicates the lack of flexibility in planning their activities and in building relationships. Thus, it would seem that we received high results on this scale, but they set additional educational tasks for university teachers.

The scale “Self-organization” just demonstrated the presence of the widespread deficit – 66.2% of respondents showed low scores on this scale. Consequently, the inability to resort to the help of external funds, that help in time management (diaries, planners, etc.) when organizing their activities, can adversely affect their self-organization in the absence of external directives.

To study the interrelations between the structural components of self-organization, we conducted the correlation analysis using the Pearson's coefficient. As a result of studying the correlations, a number of significant interrelations were revealed (Table 1 ).

As it can be seen from Table 1 , significant direct correlations between regularity, purposefulness, fixation and self-organization are revealed. This indicates that in order to develop the self-organization competence, it is necessary, first of all, to develop the skills of goal-setting, planning and performing culture.

To confirm the hypothesis on formation of self-organization through subordination and discipline, differences in the components of the self-organization of students of military and humanitarian universities were revealed (Table 2 ).

As it can be seen from Table 2 , there are significant differences in terms of regularity and fixation. That is, the cadets of the military high school have more tactical planning skills than the future specialists in the humanities and are also more painstaking and obligatory. At the same time, on the scale “Self-organization” and the total index between these participants, no significant differences were found. Thus, the presence of difficulties in self-organization is typical both for students of civil higher educational institutions and for the cadets of the higher military school. At the same time, the presence of hard routine and service regulations rather develop discipline and the habit of obeying, than the skills of self-organization of educational activities.

Thus, we are talking about the ability to self-organization as a universal competence, on the one hand, necessary to achieve success in various areas of life, and on the other hand relevant for the implementation of the principle of continuous self-education, which is the key requirement for the future professional (Tarkhanova & Koryakovtseva, 2018). In this regard, we define the task of developing students' self-organization in educational activities as one of the priorities for the modernization of vocational education.

Adhering to the postulates of the humanitarian paradigm, we focus on the fundamental non-linearity of the processes of self-organization in our study. Identity formation and self-actuating of the individual imply the existence of several options, branches, dead ends (Ergas, 2017). Moreover, the way out to certain trajectories is often associated with the spontaneous action of external factors, a series of accidents, small fluctuations during a period of personal crisis (Smirnov, Dvoryatkina, & Melnikov, 2017). This changes the idea of hard determinism of educational and professional development and increases the importance of the individual educational route (Shipunova & Berezovskaya, 2018; Westaby, Pfaff, & Redding, 2014). The personality of the student is filled with value-semantic content, self-processes and self-ability are actualized (self-knowing, self-understanding, self-determination, creative self-actuating).

The most complete understanding of the educational self-organization of specialists of the future is revealed through a number of functions:

• adaptation (adequate adaptation to the conditions of a rapidly changing professional environment);

• compensation (correction of professional behavior and activities in accordance with the requirements of professional standards);

• assessment (understanding the results of activities in accordance with the specified criteria and indicators of its effectiveness);

• stimulation of activities (openness to new experience, breadth of life and professional interests);

• optimization of communication (communication, exchange of information with colleagues give confidence, professional modernity);

• meaning-making (active search for new meanings of professional activities, one’s own attitude to truth, opportunities for self-actuating).

Conclusion

Summing up the analysis of the problems of developing the ability to self-organization in educational activities, we conclude that the crucial importance in the training process should belong to the student's control of his/her actions, his/her full awareness of the goals and consequences of his/her activities.

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