Building Professional Competence Of Future Humanities Specialists At University

Abstract

The aim of the study is to analyze the effectiveness of implementing the ideas of the competency-based approach in education and to describe the problems and contradictions observed in the building process of the professional competence of humanities specialists. The authors developed and described pedagogical technology. The idea of implementing the technology is to combine theoretical knowledge, practical skills, as well as pragmatism of the required qualifications with creating the value of future specialists. The leading idea of the technology for the professional training of humanities specialists is orientation towards the creation of spiritual and moral values, including the values of future professional activity. To check the effectiveness of the technology, authors have developed pedagogical methods, techniques, forms of education and training of students, as well as methods of experimental work and analysis of the data obtained. The received data were used in practical pedagogical activities as part of the educational process of the university. The experiment involved the use of empirical methods, which provided a significant amount of information. To assess the changes received, researchers surveyed students at the stages of establishing, forming and generalizing the experiment. The use of the proposed technology demonstrated positive changes in the general cultural level of students, the level of development of their professional culture, professional competence, expansion of professional interests. The effectiveness of the implementation of pedagogical technology was experimentally confirmed.

Keywords: Education, professional competence, humanities specialists

Introduction

The competence model of education serves as a mechanism for implementing the ideas of educational modernization, which aims to prepare students for professional activity, their professional self-determination within an educational institution, as well as general and professional preparation of students for the full range of life functions. In our opinion, the training of humanitarian specialists is a significant area of higher education. The effective solution of tasks in this area ensures successful development of the country's economy. In today's world, the level of specialist training in higher education institutions is gradually increasing (Bochkareva et al., 2020). In this regard, modern trends in the development of the education system in Russia bring forward the task of improving the training of humanitarian specialists and shaping their professional qualities. The authors believe that in modern conditions the methodology of assessing the quality of training of humanities specialists should be based not only on economic, material, technical criteria but also include the possible development of human personality in social, spiritual and moral terms.

Problem Statement

The relevance of the investigated problem is connected with the need of potential employers in highly qualified specialists of humanitarian profile and increased requirements of participants of educational relations to practical knowledge and skills, to the level of formation of universal, general professional and professional competencies. It is necessary to model the process of learning and the formation of its content by developing curricula and syllabi of courses that are part of the modular structure of humanities education, considering the current problems, needs and peculiarities of the modern world. The question of the competitiveness of humanities specialists on the labour market is relevant, but it has not received a direct and unambiguous answer due to a number of contradictions:

• at the level of public policy, between the need recognized by the state and society to train specialists in the humanities who can adequately respond to the constant change of social priorities, and the existing system of vocational education failing to properly ensure the mobility and competitiveness of young specialists in the labor market;
• at the level of professionalism, between the goals of professional education in training humanities bachelors aimed at ensuring the economic growth of the country, and the goals of higher professional education fixed in the current Federal State Educational Standards for Higher Education;
• at the level of professionalism of a specialist's personality, between the competitive environment in the education area and the lack of an effective pedagogical technology determining the social mobility of a graduate to start an independent professional activity.

This defined the research problem: What should be the pedagogical technology of forming professional competence of humanitarian students at the university?

Research Questions

Purpose of the Study

The purpose of the study is to develop and experimentally test the pedagogical technology of building professional competence of humanities specialists. The authors suggested that the developed technology is likely to meet modern requirements of the labor market under conditions:

• pedagogical technology is designed considering three aspects (scientific, procedural-descriptive, procedural-active) and is built as a system of scientifically grounded forms, techniques and methods aimed at training a qualified humanities specialist;

Research Methods

The theoretical and methodological basis of the study includes the psychological theory of personality development in the activity process (L. Vygotsky, S. Rubinshtein, etc.); competence, personal-oriented approaches in learning (I. Zimnya, A. Khutorskoy, V. Serikov, I. Yakimanskaya et al.); methodology for building educational technologies and systems (V. Bespalko, G. Selevko et al.); research on the problem of abilities and their development (V. Shadrikov et al.).

The research involved the following research methods: general theoretical; empirical (observation, conversation, study of organizational and pedagogical conditions of the student's personality development, generalization of pedagogical and professional experience; sociological (questionnaires, interviews, surveys); socio-psychological (testing); prognostic (modeling, designing); experimental (stating and forming experiments); mathematical and statistical processing of experimental data.

Findings

The pedagogical experiment allowed to assess the efficiency of the developed pedagogical technology. The experiment was conducted in the natural conditions of the educational process on the basis of higher educational institutions of Moscow and Chelyabinsk, and involved 230 students of 2–4 years.

There was little difference between the control group and the experimental group at the beginning of the experiment, which made it possible to proceed with its implementation.

To solve the problems of formation of professional competence of humanities specialists we have allocated seven indicators: choice of a profession in the humanitarian area; motives of studying at the university; level of moral qualities; degree of pedagogical influence; presence of creative and communicative qualities providing professional competence of students.

Based on the revealed importance of moral qualities for building the professional competence of a specialist in the humanities, we will consider the changes in indicators of the main socially important moral qualities of students (Table 01, 02).

During the two-year period on the development and formation of moral qualities of students, the content of the experimental impact was based on the program, consisting of curriculum-graphics, evaluation criteria, calendar and thematic plan, abstracts of mini-lectures, practical classes and activities.

Before experiment the experts assessed the level of students' moral development. It required two years of pedagogical work to obtain significant differences. The results of the implemented program on education of basic moral and volitional qualities of students allow to note the following trends. The general evaluation of the moral and volitional qualities of the students in the control group has changed from 3.29±0.13 to 3.59±0.12 during the experiment. In the experimental group it has changed from 3.28±0.12 to 4.38±0.13 (Table 02).

Analysis of the data showed that the students of the experimental group had a significant dynamics of the levels of forming moral qualities, and such moral aspects as diligence, kindness, politeness and discipline prevailed.

To test the developed pedagogical technology of building professional competence of a humanities specialist, we chose the most significant professional qualities, included into the characteristics of the key competencies of professional training: organization (business potential), creativity (creative and self-critical potential), communication potential, professional competence in the professional field, for which we developed observation maps (Table 03).

The analysis of the statistical data of the experiment shows that the students of the experimental group are ready for professional activity, they have at a sufficient level of professional competence demonstrated a high level of expression – 38.1 %, average – 31.9 %. Only 18.1 % of students in the control group had a high level of professional competence, and 21.9 % had an average level.

Conclusion

We experimentally proved that the process of forming professional competence depends on the moral foundation of an individual. It is impossible to manage the professional motivating sphere of students and building their professional competence without a developed moral basis. The experiment has shown that within two years of work it is possible to form the high moral potential of students and successfully manage the professional-motivating sphere of students and the whole system of professional training on its basis.

Authors believe that this approach to the solution of the problem under study will give a more objective assessment of the results of pedagogical work with students of the humanitarian profile, allow to regulate the process of building the professional competence of students. The results of the experiment testify to the effectiveness of the technology developed by the authors to build the professional competence of humanities specialists.

The research and experimental work showed that students in the experimental group have higher scores on the proposed potential. This proves that, on the one hand, the proposed potentials of the key competencies for professional training of a humanities specialist are real and vital, and on the other hand, at the current stage of development of the higher education system there are reserves for building professional competence of specialists. The study found that students in the experimental group had a significant increase in quality achievement and attendance. We attribute this to the increased interest in the content of the classes and the need for practice-oriented systematic knowledge. The growth of attendance and achievement has also increased slightly in the control group, but this indicates the effectiveness of the proposed technology and the use of active forms of teaching students in the educational process.

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