Living world as a base of professional formation of students

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Living world as a base of professional formation of students

Demidova I.F.

The article suggests an approach to organizing students' professional training based on their living world type, conditions, criteria and means for such organization are being assigned. Living world system, typology and regularities of professional formation at the stage of professional training for each living world type is reviewed in detail. A program of professional training for students based on their living world is suggested.

Professional formation is a long term process in human life, that begins with choosing future profession and ends with retirement. One of most important stages of this process is professional training, because that is where readiness to work in specialty in future is formed, PVK is developed and professional future is planned. At the same time, nowadays situation of coping with labor-market in our country is unsatisfactory, because entrants often choose their future profession based on outer attractiveness of that profession, but not on their inner world, and study not for knowledge but for a diploma. This situation is stimulated by the employers, who usually value the presence of a diploma of higher education but neither competence of their future employees nor the level of their special and professional training. As a result of such situation, it is hard or even nearly impossible for a person, who doesn't work in his specialty, to realize himself in his further professional activity, he will face emotional burnout, lack of prospect crisis and in-personal conflicts earlier. Therefore, an important front of work of institutes of higher education is formation of orientation for work in specialty among students. And that is where a problem of organizing such work arises. We think that teaching, based on student's living world using sense-technologies and interpersonal dialogue, can form readiness to work in specialty with future orientation on self realizing or simple satisfaction with one's own activity.

The central term of suggested approach is living world. The term of living world has been reviewed by different authors in different context (E. Gusserl, 1986: 1994; J.-P. Sartre, 2001; S. Buller, 1933; B.G. Ananiev, 2001,2005; S.L. Rubinshtein, 1957; 1997; F.E. Vasiliuk 1997; D.A. Leontiev, 2003; 2004; L.I. Antciferova, 1998; A.A. Derkatch, 2002; R.A. Akhmerov, 2003; B.S. Bratus, 1997; 1999; T.h. Berezina, 1997; I.T. Kasavin, 2004).

Living world is usual everyday life, inter-subjective world that is constructed by the consciousness of people that make it up, which they perceive as something that goes without saying, beyond any doubt, and which is a world of general meanings and senses for those who live inside it. Philosophical approach to living world consists in picking out such of its features as subjectiveness, unconsciousness, influence on person's behavior, his choice of prospects, future planning. It a certain interpsychological reality that determines a person's course of life, but often not realized by the person himself.

In modern psychology the term of living world is reviewed from different points of view, filled with different meanings, but for all that, the term living world may be not mentioned, and its manifestations are studied as independent phenomena - course of life (S. Buller, A.G. Ananiev, N.A. Loginova, V.V. Ivanova, A.A. Kronik, E.Y. Korjhova, A.A. Derkatch), living strategy (А.К. Abulkhanova-Slavskaya, L.I. Antciferova, G.V. Ivanchenko, T.N. Berezina), living plan (N.A. Poletaeva, T.Y. Bradulova), living style (C. Morris, E. Dreicurs-Fergusson). There is no unified opinion of ether living strategies and plans are formed upon certain age or are subject to change through out the course of life, and of how they relate to living world itself. It is emphasized, that through out the course of life an image of world is formed by each person, but different authors have more wide or narrow meaning for the term of this image.

Analysis of different approaches to living world and it's manifestations allowеd formulating several positions about it's essence.

Living world is formed unconsciously under the influence of family, culture, mass media, education, different forms of social consciousness, and determinates different choices of a person. человека. It can be said, that subjective living world, which opens to a person in his self consciousness through value-orientation and life-sense questions, influences on person's building individual life-style, life course and fate as whole. Living world interacts with real world, and from that interaction an image of real world is formed. Being the subject of his own life, a person builds life plans, creates living strategies, defines living prospects and thus, becomes as active builder of his own fate, a subject of a life course. At the same time, every one has his own life course building style. And what this style and life course will be completely depends on living world contents. Therefore, living world can be viewed as a kind of system, that has it's own contents, functions and dynamics in the structure of a person's inner world.

Main function of living world is life integration. It is a kind of system creating factor, in terms of which a person builds his life. Depending on living world contents, a person makes decisions, life choices, performs actions, creates living strategy and life style. It often goes unconsciously for the person himself, as not everybody thinks of the reasons of their actions and motives for their behavior. Although, regardless whether it is conscious process or not, everyone has a general line in life that he follows, and that line is determined by a persons living world.

Two aspects can be picked out from the contents of living world: cognitive aspect and personal aspect. Cognitive aspect consists of outlook and beliefs system. Outlook is a system of views on outer world and a persons place in it. This is exactly where sayings “a man acts according to what he believes” or “this is contrary with my views and beliefs” come from.

D.A. Leontiev [10] suggests differing 4 aspects of outlook: contentional (postulates, on which subjects conception of regularities that act in the world is built); valuative (a system of ideals, giving a conception of what the world should be or become); structural (features of psychological organization of separate outlook postulates into more or less single whole); functional (grade and character of outlook structure influence on persons actions and perception and comprehension of reality).

Outlook is always cognitive in its contents, it is a kind of “knowledgalble” components. A person can describe his idea of the world, it is formed on level of knowledge understanding, literature reading, close people views. The more is a person keen on knowledge, education, science, the more complete his outlook is, the more “scientific” it is. Scientific outlook is connected with logical thinking, ability to argue, to receive and process information. And vice versa, people with worldy psychology domination and mythological thinking, lack interest to scientific knowledge, they settle for popular literature or other people experience and do not perceive scientific facts, which results in their outlook being shallow and nonscientific. “Outlook always bears a deeply singular imprint of person-individual features, world knowledge in it forms an alloy with beliefs, not always clear conceptions and unconscious schemes and stereotypes” [10, p. 4].

Personal aspect consists of motives, values and senses. They are always emotional as they represent the very essence of a person. Correlations between these components are rather hard to define, because they are intertwined with each other. A motive is something for what a person performs certain actions, it answers the question “why does a person need that?” Values and senses in their turn answer the question “why is that what a person needs?”, which is usually because that is of some value and sense for a person. Correlations between senses and values differ in width. Sense is a more wide and univocal term, while values are included into sense and concretize it. For example, work is a life sense for a person, he realizes his values in it, such as self establishment, self development and self realization. That is why he spends a lot of time at work, “puts himself into it”, i.e. realization of values is the motive. A person can have different values and senses with the same motive. If in the given example the sense is a “beautiful” life, then high salary, luxurious house, a car are the values, but work is the mean to achieve this “beautiful” life for this person, so he will pay a lot of attention to it.

Hereby, the way a person will realize his sense, and what this sense will be depends on values. In this case terms “values” and “value” orientations are synonyms. But matching terms “sense” and “life-sense orientations” is not considered possible. Naturally, the difference between those two terms is not always certain, but it exists. Life-sense orientations are value based meaningful methods of sense realizing. For example, self realization in professional activity can be achieved by increasing professionalism and competence or by ignoring others' interests, domination, imposing your point of view.

When born, a person finds himself in ready real world. That world is not homogenous in it's structure, it is specified by the time in which the person lives, society and culture in which he was born. That culture has its traditions, ethic values, family and marriage institution, education and upbringing system, world of professions, labor market, as well, as every society has its economical, political, religious systems and environmental situation. All of that will influence the child while he grows up, forming his living world, defining the sense of his life.

First world that a child gets into is the world of family. his parents and other relatives each have their own living world, and totality of those living worlds has formed the order of the family. That order will determine child's living world for long, if not forever. There is a reason why many outstanding psychologists and psychotherapists emphasize the role of early life experience in child's development and self definition. Although, each one of them considers only the part of that experience, which correlates with their theoretical views, the statement itself is beyond any doubt.

Next world that starts influencing the child is the world of the country and culture he lives in. This world influences him through mass media, advertisement, propaganda and other elements of mass consciousness. Lets look at a well known example. UNESCO regularly conducts polls among school students about their knowledge, checking it's real level at the same time. The results have been stable for the last 10 years. Korea and Japan show The highest level of real knowledge, while they value it as intermediate. Americans value their knowledge the highest, while the real knowledge level is quite low. That is the influence of ideology.

After that the child enters various education establishments, and his living world gets influenced by education system. It forms not only the knowledge system, but also the outlook, that can be scientific or mythological, active and meditative. Our goal does not include different education systems analysis and defining which is better or worse, but the example with school students is as well a representation of education system.

Studying in school, the child gets acquainted with the world of professions. Unfortunately, in our country the acquaintance is unsatisfactory. School tells only about ether most popular or most demanded professions, and even those are described in a sketchy manner. As a result, graduates often don't know what qualities and abilities are required for this or that profession, whether they will be able to realize their demands and values in it, or if it correlates with the living world that they have formed. They enter higher or middle special educational establishment, and higher education system starts influencing on them. Upon graduation they enter professional world and are not always able to correlate it with the living world they've got, or they start realizing their world in the given profession, which not always goes right.

But for all those years the child had been settling one more world - the world of senses and values. Firstly he just appropriates them from the worlds around him: family, culture, mass consciousness. Values form with first parental prohibitions and permissions. They may vary: “Don't be greedy, let that boy play with the toy too” or “That's right, keep your's to yourself!”, etc. After that, along come cartoons, advertisement, movies that circulate the image of successful self-made person, who achieves everything with his labor and hard work, luck (American dream) or simply at all costs (which is the most often met case nowadays). Children learn, which qualities are valued the most in the society, how can one develop them, by what means success can be achieved. They form the term of success, reconsider traditional values and pick those that contribute to that success, and maybe unconsciously, but form their life sense.

Of course, other “worlds” that surround a person can be highlighted, but we're interested in correlation of the four already present: value-sense, educational, professional and living ones. Value-sense world is the first to be formed, and it gradually begins to constitute personal aspect of the living world. Based on his personal (value-sense) aspect a person chooses his profession. During the years of education, his living world strengthens, its cognitive aspect (outlook) forms, which then reveals itself in professional world. In period from 20 to 30 years, our outlook and living world stabilize and become prior related to behavior and different life choices. Its change is very seldom possible, only during personal crisis periods, when living world proves ineffective. These situations can be called existential choice situations, because values are corrected, life plans and sometimes even life sense are reconsidered. But even in such situation a person can choose not to risk changing his living world, but working out defensive mechanisms instead.

The educational world, in its turn, is a mean of development and enforcement of living world and its value-sense component. Different education systems reveal tendencies to forming this or that living world type; they influence its value-sense component. This means that knowing this component and the living world it belongs to, it is possible to, on one hand, consider them in education process and thus carrying out individual approach, and on the other hand, to develop world of values and senses, thus enriching the living world. hereby, it is exactly the living world that can bee seen as a base upon which orifessional formation and personal development occurs.

When analyzing literature, devoted to living world problem, it is possible to emphasize different living world typologies.

S.L. Rubinstein [12] always stressed, that there are two main ways for a person to exist, and, accordingly, two life attitudes. First one is a life that never exits the limits of direct connections, in which the person lives: parents at first, then friends, teachers, then a wife (or a husband), children, etc. In this case the person is completely inside his life, his each attitude is an attitude towards distinct phenomena, but not the life as a whole. The second way is connected with appearance of reflection. It some how holds, interrupts the ceaseless process of life and brings a person beyond its bounds in his mind. A person assumes a position outside of his life. This is the turning point. here the first way of existence ends. Philosophical comprehension of life and life sense is connected with the appearance of reflection.

Two life types were also mentioned by A. Maslow [11]. his B-life and D-life are not only a result of demands hierarchy, but also a person's choice of a certain way of life, based on preferred motivation and values.

D-life is the human ambition to satisfy the existing deficit or environment demands. Their position is to “live by today”. D-life is characterized by routine and monotony, a denial to take anything seriously, a tendency to simple but pleasant actions (work all day, come home, eat, spend the whole night in front of a TV).

B-life is an effort and a dash, when a person the full potential of his abilities. How ever, this life is impermanent, it is a period, a moment when a person is more concentrated, more immediate, creative and open for emotions.

Accordingly, life sense of these people varies as well.

Close in its essence to Maslow's approach is the typology of life programs, suggested by R.A. Akhmerov [1; 2]. he emphasizes two life programs of a person - program of social-psychological adaptation to society (encouraged by society) and self-realization program that doesn't always match the adaptation program. Self-realization program can often be not apperceived by personality. Living activity of a personality may decrease when outliving the fact that adaptation program does not contribute to self-realization, and reveals in outliving of sense loss, in biographical crisis (Akhmerov, 1994, 1997).

A.R. Fonarev [13] emphasizes three moduses of life, which can also be viewed as manifestations of person's living world. First modus is the modus of possession. In it's contents it is close to first life way by Rubinstein, D-life by Maslow and adaptation program by Akhmerov. People living in accordance to it tend to personal comfort, profit, minimalizing any efforts in all spheres, that do not relate to personal welfare. In the latter case any risk and any sacrifice is acceptable. Every person or item is esteemed for the position of it's usefulness for satisfying one's own demands.

The second modus is the modus of social achievements. here a person is aimed at self-realization, but that self-realization may come not only as actual self-development, but also as an aspiration for power, achieving some positions, status, which in person's opinion is objective rate of his achievements.

Third modus is the modus of serving, which can be described with the following parameters: freedom, responsibility, morality, love, creative activity. Such materialization for person's spirituality is serving. These are the “peak experiences” by Malsow, B-life.

F.E. Vasiliuk [3] suggests the following typology of living worlds as criteria for dividing, suggesting terms of “outer” and “inner”, “easy” and “difficult” living world. Combining these binary positions results in the following categorical typology.

1. Inner simple and outer easy (Infantile) living world provides immediate satisfaction of demands of the being living in that world. his life is reduced to direct vitality, and obeys to principle of pleasure.

2. Inner simple and outer difficult living world (Realistic). The difference of this living world form the previous one is that the goods, necessary for life aren't given directly. Outer space is imbued with barriers, resistance of things, and that is why the main “organ of life” of the being in here is objective activity.

3. Inner complex and outer simple living world (Value) The main problem of living in simple and complex world is not outer (how to reach the goal? how to satisfy my demands?) but inner (What goal should be put? What for Should I act?). Inner integrity is the main life necessity for this world, and the only principle, capable to coordinate differently aimed life attitudes is the principle of value.

4. Inner complex and outer difficult world (Creative). Main inner necessity of this world's subject is incarnation of ideal over-situative design of his life as whole. This problem has to be solved on material of concrete situative actions in conditions of constant inconveniences and regularly resuming inner misalignment. In it's essence such problem is creative, as it never has any pre-made solving algorithm.

D.A. Leontiev [9] suggests emphasizing three living world types based on such criteria as time structure and individual and society correlation.

First living world type is the most ancient historically it can be denoted as traditionalist life model or traditionalist living world. It is a life based or reproduction, cyclisity, homeostasis. Past is the dominating time, which sets all guides; present should repeat he past, and future should repeat he present. Variations from this standard are not welcome.

Second living world type can be defined as hedonistic, it is not much younger than the first one. It is a life style of those, who does not subdue his own interests to interests of social whole, but contradicts them and makes traditional society a mean of satisfying of their own demands.

Third way to organize living world appears when there are people who transcend not only the system of social norms and rule but also their actual needs, interests and demands, Projects are built, pragmatically non-specified knowledge accumulation appears. This living world can be defined as “progressive”. Such living world is aimed at the future. Science, culture and creative business, that makes something new, live there.

Living world type content analysis, suggested by different authors, allows emphasizing several alikeness in those contents, and combine them by those alikeness. Thus, traditional life type (Rubistein), D-life (Maslow), and social adaptation (Akhmerov) are close in their contents and passing, as well as their contraries - reflexive life type (Rubinstein), B-life (Maslow) and self-realization (Akhmerov). That is why henceforth we will talk about two world types - traditional type and self-realization type, considering contentional alikeness of above named world types. Also, close in their contents are infantile (Vasiliuk) and hedonistic (Leontiev) world types, creative and progressive world types (on the condition of active life position for creative type), and the middle position between traditional and progressive world is taken by realistic world type. And completely independently stands value world. hereby, we can speak of the following living world types: Traditional, self realization, progressive, each of which includes infantile (hedonistic), realistic, value, and creative.

Therefore, professional forming is realized on the background of formed and still forming living world type of each and every student. If we want to optimize the process of professional forming, contribute not only to professional training, but personal development as well, we can not ignore that base, upon which this is carried out - the living world in which each person lives.

Professional formation conditions can be objective or subjective. The objective are: social demand for professionalism, prosperous organizing environment, relatives and colleagues support, demand for profession on labor market, worthy salary, etc. These conditions do not depend on each certain person, they depend more on socialeconomic background in the society. We can tell students about them, but we cannot teach them to change this background.

As for the subjective conditions, those are created by the person himself. Many of them can be emphasized as well, but we are interested in personal aspects, that contribute to professional formation and development. Because of the great variety of those conditions we would like to stop on the following ones: value and life-sense orientations, demand for competence [4; 5; 6; 7; 8]. Value and life-sense orientations give life a direction and a sense, help fulfilling moral and life choice. Demand for competence influences educational and development processes of employees, not allowing them to stop at what they've already achieved. Gradually, demand for competence can become a life-sense demand, which allows reaching the peaks of professionalism and professional acme. herewith, demand for competence may express itself differently, i.e. we can speak of different levels of that demand (low, middle, high), that is why the peak of professionalism can more likely be reached by people with high level of given demand.

Aside from that, conditions for professional forming are: education system, its organization and the teaching technologies applied. After analyzing different teaching paradigms (Traditional (knowledgeable), personal-oriented, competence-oriented, sense) we have come to a conclusion, that the most prospective system is the sensecentered, which allows influencing living world components, forming criteria of professional forming.

Most important stages for professional forming are stages of professional training and adaptation to profession, because from how effectively these stages were passed depends how deeply did a person understand the contents of his profession, mastered its operational system, realized his abilities and prospects for self-development, how high will his motivation to become a real professional will be. It is necessary to emphasize personal criteria of professional forming, presence of which is quite important for a university graduate and will allow him to become a real professional in the future. We think that such criteria are: psychological readiness to professional activity, professional I-conception, professional self definition, readiness for crisis and overcoming them, motives of professional self-statement, development of self-understanding, finding a personal sense in professional activity, rational thinking.

Each type of living world will have its different conditions (value and life-sense orientations, demand for competence) and criteria of professional formation.

What will the process of professional formation be with different living world types? Representatives of infantile and hedonistic living worlds will have a spontaneous process with no distinct criteria. With traditional and realistic living worlds this process will be stereotypical, professional I-conception will be stereotypical as well as incomplete, motives of professional self-statement will be weak, professional activity will be more of a method for reaching material welfare or status, professional self-definition and psychological readiness for professional activity may vary in wide range and will have an individual character, self-understanding will be intermediate. In value, creative and self-realization worlds this will be an active process with developed professional I-conception and professional seld-definition, high readiness for professional activity, developed motives of professional self-statement, high self-understanding, but only if the person seeks sense in professional activity and it will be a life-sense orientation to him. Otherwise, professional formation will be traditional with individual changes in some criteria. And finally, the progressive living world. Again, if professional activity is a value, professional formation process will be active, professional I- conception and self-definition will be well developed, psychological readiness will be high, but self-understanding and motives of professional self-statement will be poorly developed, and there'll be no personal sense in professional activity, it will be a mean for fulfilling greater plans. And if the professional activity is of no value for a person, then Professional formation will be spontaneous.

For a full-fledged professional formation of students it is necessary to create such atmosphere in educational establishment, so that education would contribute the most to development of sense sphere and readiness to work by speciality in the future. The mean for such education are sense-techniques and sense-technologies, and the form is inter personal dialogue, i.e. by including the system of sense-technologies into an interpersonal dialogue, we will achieve the best results.

Conditions we've emphasized, methods and criteria of professional formation on the stage of professional training are present in the table below.

professional student education competence

Table 1

Educational activity motives

Professional self-statement motives

Sense paradigm in education Finding personal sense in professional labor

Self-understanding

Rational thinking

The whole program of work with students can be divided into several parts or phases. On phase one diagnostic of students living world type is carried out. This phase takes place in second semester of first year of studying. Lets give some grounding to this choice of time for diagnostics. First, students need time to adapt to each other, the educational establishment they've entered, studying conditions. Sincerity and openness that are required for inter personal dialogue and many sense-techniques are not likely to happen between people, who barely know each other. By second semester, the process of initial adaptation is finished and work can be begun. Second, first year students have more fundamental subjects to learn, and as the result of that learning categorical apparatus of sciences is founded, and a deep digestion of those subjects is needed, so experimenting with new teaching forms is inadvisable. Third, students enter higher education establishment having an already formed living world, so diagnosing it is quite justified. More to it, late diagnostics will lower reliability of secondary diagnostics as after adapting, students will start influencing each other, studying system will start influencing them and their living worlds will get slightly reconstructed.

A t the same time, this does not mean that during this period of education we should not use any teaching methods but the traditional ones. We can use active teaching methods, tasks for rational thinking development, and tasks and sense-technical influences aimed at relationships, for example, on discovering advantages and disadvantages of the relation object. Generally, we suppose that the beginning period of education should be used for development of rational, logical thinking. This condition of professional formation is basic for other two.

Second phase is the development of differentiated studying plans considering living world types and competence demand level. Given plans are aimed at forming the criteria of professional formation that correspond to the living world. These plans will be imbued with various sense-technologies. This does not mean, that we must completely individualize education process. We speak exactly of differentiation, division of students into groups with similar living worlds. We do not pursue an aim to change the living world, although we suggest, that it may be somehow modified during education process.

Third phase is the realization of above mentioned plans. The problem is that efficiency of this phase depends on coordinated teachers' work, i.e. these plans must be realized by teachers of graduation lectern, naturally considering the specifics of the subject. We can hardly form professional formation criteria if it is done by one enthusiastic teacher. This is a complex work, that requires coordination and will last till the fifth year of studying.

On the fifth yearсof studying, final, conclusive phase is carried out - secondary diagnostics of professional formation criteria completeness degree. This diagnostics will not allow us do any correction on students personalities, but will give us an opportunity to value the plans we developed and correct them for other students if needed.

Besides, it is possible to carry out diagnostics of competence demand, value orientation, rational thinking and the contents of certain professional forming criteria of students at the end of every year of studying.

It would be nice to hope that this given work is perspective and will allow optimizing professional forming process, by making it more personal, value, conscious, which afterwards will help recent students their place in life, self-realize, an get more satisfaction from life, by filling it with sense.

The Literature

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2. Akhmerov R.A. Biographic crisis of personality: Diss. … cand. psycholл. Scien. - MOSCOW, 1994.

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8. Demidova I.F. Development of competence demand via sense-technologies // Matelials of scientific-practical conference “Ananievs readings - 2006”. SPb, 2006. - P. 253-254.

9. Leontiev D.A. To living worlds typology // 2 Russian scientific-practical conference on existential psychology: message materials / After D.A. Leontiev. - MOSCOW: Sense, 2004. - P. 114-114.

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