Pedagogical Specialties Students' Pedagogical Support For Work In Summer Health Camps

Abstract

In our opinion, great teacher A.S. Makarenko's legacy has not only not been thoroughly studied but also exceedingly distorted under the influence of Soviet ideology. These created several myths that formed the basis of a definite canonical scheme damaging and continuing to harm the grounds of future teachers' professional training. First of all, this is a focus in line with "collectivist" pedagogy to create "small groups" based on the formation of a specific activity type or pastime (communication) for team building. At the same time, we can define a school class or a student group as a "small group," and educational activity is the "cohesion "factor, which becomes a foundation, being individualistic in nature. The teachers' attention was drawn to this fact, pointing out the limited possibilities of a unified school team formation. Simultaneously, teachers emphasized education, based on a broad life practice, including work, without which the education process can't exist. As we can see from the current perspective, without meaningful education, the simple assimilation of knowledge creates a human-consumer, which contributes to the separation of people and acts as a factor of social differentiation. The purposeful education process, based on socially significant work, leads to the creative person who has an active life position and is an innovative and spiritual-moral person capable of productive social and pedagogical activity.

Keywords: Camp counselor training, instructional camp, pedagogical support, student collective

Introduction

Secondary school experience in the village of Danilovka of the JAR, in the field of cooperation with the teaching staff and the director, in addition to being an energetic and creative person, also has the attractive charisma of a leader who is open to informal communication. Conversing with G.N. Pobokov (Fishbein, 2010) resulted in close cooperation between the university and the school, the idea of creating different age groups student collectives capable of educationally "equip" a rural school, following the example of teachers from Danilovka, appeared. The need for such "practice" will increase as the teaching staff ages fast. The rural school turns out to be in a rather complicated situation. Its "strength" and survival skills are almost exhausted, and young specialists' employment at schools does not have a long-term perspective. We counted on a different age group team, united at the university and capable of providing psychological, financial, and professional support to the future young specialist as a fellow student in the spirit of traditions brought up in the "alma mater" (Grigorova, 2013).

Problem Statement

Such student group creation turned out to be a difficult task, as it required an informal approach and a specific infrastructure, which the university did not yet have. Within several years, in addition to student groups' curators, the university introduced positions of deputy deans for educational work and created an extracurricular activities department, a camp counselor training school, a tourist center. Professionals carefully selected and organized an experimental site (Senashenko, 2011).

The natural character of the experimental work was because it was carried out in conditions close to future activities when the selected and trained different age groups (micro groups) began to engage in educational and recreational activities with children.

The ideological design of the experimental work was accompanied by the understanding that a life teacher's training did not consist only in the education of a teacher who knew the subject and teaching methodology well. It was the education of a skilled teacher with the educator's creative abilities, having such competencies, which standards, programs, and curricula are not sufficiently focused on (Fishbein, 2010).

Research Questions

According to A.A. Frolov, A.S. Makarenko's pedagogical system aspires scholars to search for such an educational technology that would ensure, on the one hand, mass education and, on the other hand, equality of all participants in the education process. At the same time, considering the pedagogical nature of the projected future activity, we should solve the issues of the formation, developing, and improving educator's teaching creative style (as cited in Zinchenko et al., 2020).

Thus, the problem of finding a form of collective organization in which an individual will be both the most disciplined and the freest is visible (Makarenko, 1984).

There is a contradiction in the research questions formulation. Namely: the smaller the group, the fewer degrees of freedom for each member and higher discipline and responsibility. Whereas in large groups with greater freedom of relations and interactions, as a rule, the level of responsibility and performance discipline is lower.

We managed to find a solution in a combination of pedagogical influence on emerging relationships and interaction in large and small groups sharing spheres of activity and responsibility.

As a small group, a micro group of classmates was identified, united by a common goal and activity as camp counselors-educators during the summer pedagogical internship (Chopin et al., 2012).

As a large group, a temporary team was organized, united by a common goal and activity during the instructional camp when counselors-educators learned the basics of educational and recreational activities.

Micro-groups had preliminary theoretical training during the "Camp Counselor Training" organized at the university. Professionals organized this school by the Faculty of Additional Pedagogical Professions, offering students a list of clubs, studios, sports, tourist sections, and interest clubs. Moreover, each faculty added their creative tradition to this list. The camp counselor training school had an interfaculty orientation. Its task was theoretical training and binding students in micro-groups. In addition to the teacher-organizer, being a specialist of the educational work department, teachers of the Department of Pedagogy and Psychology, and undergraduate students who had experience in leadership activities (Ferguson & Maksimiv, 2017) were also involved in the work at the camp counselor training school.

Purpose of the Studу

The purpose of the paper is to consider the value system, which underlies the management of the psychological and pedagogical support process and the future teachers' active life position formation.

Research Methods

For constructive and projective activity, A.S. Makarenko's works on the different aged organization of educational collectives, I.P. Ivanov's works on the organization of group creative events, and the author's specific course "The system of values determining the professional orientation of the educator's active life position" were used as the theoretical foundation. We focused the academic training and experimental work on psychological and pedagogical support and stimulation of the future teacher's active life position formation (as cited in Fishbein, 2010).

In urban culture, the natural character is less visible in a modern person. It means that the artificiality of the environment inevitably cultivates two negative phenomena for the development of human history: misleading (deception) and hedonism.

In this regard, we can realize future teachers' psychological-pedagogical support and educational work technologies with the help of pedagogical therapy knowledge, aimed to introduce the idea of "deep goodness", which we associate with the elimination of unfavorable effects on the spiritual health of social pupils (Adolf, 2015). K.D. Ushinsky wrote about the therapeutic effects of education and pedagogical therapy, claiming that there were "unintentional caregivers," as such is the caresses of a mother or a nanny, the atmosphere in the family, "the peaceful noise of oak trees," and "the silence of the fields". Pedagogical therapy, in our opinion, can be carried out most successfully based on the integration of educational activities with the impact of natural resources, when various wellness procedures are used as an effective means, primarily hot mineral springs (as cited in Levkova et al., 2018).

In this regard, we chose the nature reserves surrounding the unique source of healing mineral waters – Kuldur as an experimental site. Everyone who comes to Kuldur for the first time admires its nature, the favorable weather, the beneficial effect on human health of pure taiga air, and hot mineral springs. A sanatorium has been functioning here for several decades, in which not only adults but also children undergo a course of treatment together. The choice of an experimental site opened up the finest prospects for the implementation of the small groups (micro groups) self-organization process, which "grow up" from a large group (instructional camp) based on a sense of proportion and harmony. These processes' implementation should have been facilitated by a specially organized environment in which interaction with the surrounding nature played a dominant and therapeutic role.

Thus, the presence of future teachers surrounded by nature feeling comfortable corresponds to the principle of common sense, the carrier of which is the intelligentsia, and in our understanding of the "Life Teacher" during the organization of the instructional camp; the main contingent consisted of representatives of this layer of society. We considered the social processes reversibility factor as the mechanism of psychological and pedagogical support and stimulation of an active life position formation during the experiment under the intentional pedagogical work. We ensured the possibility of launching this mechanism by the decisive influence on the emergence of definite values was not in the effect of social and educational factors but their subjective perception by a developing personality (Berezina et al., 2020).

Having described the mechanism, we should note that people working together in the instructional school often differed in their perception of the events. They had different practical goals. Nevertheless, there were no disagreements between them. This factor becomes decisive in the process of psychological and pedagogical support and the formation of an active life position in the conditions of experimental work (Fishbein, 2010).

The ideology of a large group was the supremacy of spiritual values, concentrated in a value system that is opposed to the manifestation of eternal values in human life (Lubkov, 2020). We associate manifestation with adaptive values, which determine the horizontal component of the value influence on the personality. The observed acceleration of social time makes a person's life and his value orientations more manifested when the value "surface" becomes more and more flat and smooth, and the value "vertical" less and less "perturbs" the breadth and smoothness of visible life prospects. The whirlwind of new impressions does not capture the depths of human essence, occasionally emerging existential insights spread over the life surface easily (Kulikova et al., 2018).

At the preliminary stage of the large group formation, during theoretical training at the university, we realized the task during psychological and pedagogical support to stimulate a "vertical" component in the future teachers' value worldview (Vasilyeva, 2009). The emergence of a value vertical is the criterion for psychological and pedagogical support efficiency. The process itself has been carried out thanks to the "braking" mechanism when under the influence of external natural factors and the human environment, a "different" life begins. Slowing down and stopping allowed future teachers to contact the natural environment, which, thanks to virtual technologies, is becoming less and less in their lives. The acceleration of social time made it possible to design these meetings. We organized the meeting with the older generation most naturally due to its location.

Archpriest A. Schmemann (as cited in Berezina et al., 2020) believed that if "youth does not know about death, it does not know life either… Youth "lives," but does not thank. But only the one knows life who can thank" (Berezina et al., 2020, p. 62). The essence of life is preparation for death. It is how Socrates defines philosophy. It is a philosophy that allows us to comprehend and understand the life path associated with love, which changes its appearance throughout life. Meeting with an old age capable of loving sincerely and selflessly reveals to the youth the essence of love for children. And it is a criterion for psychological and pedagogical support efficiency.

Thus, the stopping and inertial processes associated with the braking mechanism "lift" the horizontal values, stimulating the process of strengthening the internal values vertical in the minds of future teachers, which we associate with the individual's active life position.

As a result, subjective by their nature value professional orientations appear, as well as a value attitude to oneself as a future teacher, to a child as an object and subject of the pedagogical activity, that is, images of subject-subject and subject-object relations. These circumstances explain the need for a supra-situatedness (redundancy) of short-term pedagogical influence factor in the conditions of experimental work. It is designed to ensure that in the same conditions, being objectively under the same situations, the results of this influence on students are sufficiently predictable.

In other words, psychological and pedagogical support and stimulation of the formation of an active life position in the education process is mainly a change in subjective value images associated with future professional activity, attitudes towards it both on the part of teachers organizing the education process and on the part of students who are active participants in this process. According to our experiment, reflection is at the heart of what united all participants in the transforming value-professional activity process (Puzanova & Larina, 2021).

The driving force of psychological and pedagogical support is an objective contradiction between the nature of the value-professional tasks that form the basis of the education content in the conditions of an instructional camp and the insufficient development of the spiritual and moral sphere of future teachers. This contradiction becomes a real driving force due to its subjectivation when the tasks proposed for solving are filled with personal meanings, and unwillingness to solve them is perceived subjectively as an individual and professional problem (Luksha et al., 2017). Considering this circumstance, we include several stages in the logical chain of this contradiction productive resolution.

During the experiment, we tested the value system of pedagogical management to control the psychological and pedagogical support and the future teachers' active life position formation. The research results let us verify the hypothesis offered at the beginning of the study that stimulating the active life position formation is a process and outcome of the value-semantic and value-professional activity. The irreversibility of value erosion becomes a reversible process, generating both new value-goals and new experiences. The psychological and pedagogical support consisted of the following substantive components:

- Actualization, renewal, the embodiment of values and meanings of professional activity;

- Mastering the position of an educator, developed during growth into an active life position of a life Teacher;

- The emergence of a professional community (pedagogical team), united by value-semantic harmony and readiness for professional cooperation;

- Extra-role interpersonal relationships in a large group;

- Expansion of the role and behaviors in the micro group.

The conditions for the effectiveness of this process were:

- The purposeful transformation of values into values-goals of education by changing the environment and introducing an alternative value system into the consciousness of future teachers;

- Immersion in activities that contribute to the consolidation of value-semantic new values in the motives and behavior of future teachers;

- Approval as a mediator of a new experience of a multi-age pedagogical team, which is a professional mini-society.

The sample representativeness was provided by the heterogeneous composition of a large group, which included teachers, mentors, students, tutors, and students who had received preliminary training at the school of counselors, reflecting the main parameters necessary for the validity of experimental work.

The repeatability of the main characteristics of pedagogical activity in experimental work reflected the organizers' intentions to ensure external validity.

We could comply with it using specific parameters:

1. The heterogeneous composition of micro-groups was close to the actual teaching staff, which usually works in a children's health camp;

2. The introduction of project methods reflected the creative nature of the pedagogical activity;

3. The problematic nature of the project activity corresponded to the complex nature of the pedagogical work;

4. The active methods' prevalence corresponded to the teachers' active-life and professional position, characteristic of pedagogical activity.

Findings

We can transfer the conditions created during the experiment and the used technology to educational and recreational work with children. They are confirmed by the positive feedback of the developed technology and further experience efficiency in organizing instructional camps, which have become an annual tradition in Kuldur for several years. We can reproduce the methodology and technology of working with a large group developed during the experiment as it has become one of the effective forms of organizing meetings.

It is common knowledge that in the course of a natural pedagogical experiment, it is necessary to have experimental and control groups, but we could not organize them simultaneously. Despite the situation that arose due to economic difficulties, we managed to comply with this requirement by holding instructional training sessions for several subsequent years, though a place was different. Thus, we could organize the control group most naturally. The difference between this group and the experimental one was that the control group did not implement the technology of immersion in the unique environment of the sanatorium, where students were in identical conditions. The control group was deprived of the opportunities provided by cohabitation and interaction with representatives of the older generation. We used lectures to conduct classes with elements of training and design.

Correlating these results, we realize the nonequivalence of formally comparing them by the same criteria. As a system built on other foundations receives its specific content, we should use a different technology based on its logic, with appropriate tools. In this regard, the comparative evaluation of the results, responding to the principles of caution and correctness, is restrained and not categorical. The specialists of the sanatorium "Kuldur" noted the following fact. The pedagogical team increased their adaptability to the working conditions of the sanatorium. It happened due to the instructional training sessions of the experiment.

The internal validity is proved by the changes during the activities in the instructional camp and appearing relationships. We can also name personal and professional modifications during the experimental work. We could see these changes through conversations, judgments analysis, the projects and products of activities.

The recorded changes are mainly external, only to some extent reflecting the changes taking place in the inner mental reality of the participants of the experiment. Noteworthy changes are usually observed in the long term. We recorded the appearance of the organizers of the instructional camps from among students who have become university teachers, heads of various educational institutions, and projects. At the same time, these external manifestations seem quite indicative because personal new skills as values have distinct external characteristics. It is by them that one can identify the presence of specific value orientations.

Conclusion

Since our goal was to achieve deep personal transformations at the transformative stage of experimental work, we created definite conditions for future teachers to live new experiences to use working with children.

We minimized the number of special psycho-diagnostic procedures. We also focused on people's observation in real situations, statements interpretation, actions, answers to indirect questions, and dialogues. The latter had a reflexive and self-assessment character.

We proposed the following statements to assess personal readiness to participate in solving problems arising during educational and recreational work with children:

- I am not ready to participate in solving these problems;

- I could do something to solve the problems that have arisen, but I do not know what and how to do;

- I understand what I can do, and I am ready to participate in solving these problems actively;

- I am ready to take an active role in organizing the solution to these problems.

The analysis of the statements allowed us to conclude that future teachers evaluate the importance of educational and recreational work. They recognize an acute problem associated with children with psychological difficulties in communication and deviant behavior (Nalivaiko & Shinkoruk, 2021). Evaluating the experimental work result, we should note that the extracurricular educational work organized by the university professionals built an integrated system providing a large scale of opportunities. The system allowed us to influence the value orientations and future teachers' worldview through psychological and pedagogical support.

The results obtained generally reflect the statistics of the university work efficiency on teacher training, in which, as in nature, there is redundancy, that is, a relatively small amount of fruit produced takes root (Fishbein, 2010).

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