Psychological foundations of pedagogical professionalism

Isaev E.I.

Moscow State
Psychological and Pedagogical University
e-mail: eiisaev@yandex.ru

In all spheres of public life, demands on the professional qualifications of workers are increasing. Professionalism is becoming a fundamental requirement for hiring and a priority criterion for evaluating performance. Intensive work is underway in Russia to develop professional standards for all types of professional activity.

In 2013, a professional standard for teachers was adopted in the country. The standard reflected the fundamental realities of education and teaching. The ideology of developmental education, grounded in psychological and pedagogical science and implemented in educational practice, was reflected in the standard's definition of the general work function of teaching as the design and implementation of the educational process in preschool, primary, basic, and secondary education institutions. The following are defined as the work functions of teachers: teaching, educational, and developmental activities.

It should be noted that the Standard identifies project-based learning as an essential criterion of teacher professionalism—the teacher's ability to develop curricula, educational programs, and age- and individual-level development programs for students. Designing and implementing educational activities within the integrated processes of learning, education, and development constitutes the essence of modern pedagogical professionalism.

A professional teacher is capable of designing fundamentally new educational content, self-determining in professionally significant situations, building self-education programs, and searching for and developing new educational technologies. A professional is an active, free, and responsible agent in the design, implementation, and creative transformation of their own work. A professional maintains in their consciousness the value-based context of professional work. The inclusion of the developmental function in professional standards establishes a new value-based and target-oriented vector for modern education as developmental education and for pedagogical activity as an activity for the development of students' personalities.

Pedagogical activity in developmental education requires a special kind of knowledge—educational knowledge. The distinctive features of educational knowledge are its multifaceted nature, systematicity, integrity, practicality, and reliance on pedagogical experience. The development of systemic educational knowledge presupposes the synthesis of many humanities disciplines—philosophical, scientific, and practical.

K.D. Ushinsky was the first to state the need to synthesize a wide range of scientific and humanitarian knowledge for pedagogical activity in his "Pedagogical Anthropology." He is credited with the purposeful and systematic application of scientific knowledge in psychology and pedagogy to understanding and substantiating the practice of teaching and educating younger generations. K.D. Ushinsky was the first to formulate the problem of pedagogical education as a scientific and theoretical problem. He was one of the first to raise the question of the importance of scientific psychology for pedagogical activity, pointing out that "psychology, in relation to its applicability to pedagogy and its necessity for the teacher, occupies first place among the sciences" [13, p. 35]. K.D. Ushinsky carried out the first attempt at a systematic presentation of psychological knowledge for the teacher. More than a century later, the importance of psychological knowledge for human life was noted by G.P. Shchedrovitsky: «In a certain sense, psychology is the whole world, taken from a certain point of view, and therefore psychology is not only a collection of some scientific disciplines, but the entire universe of human activity, taken from a certain angle, from a certain perspective, with a certain technical and practical attitude» [15, p. 109].

It was in furtherance of K.D. Ushinsky's ideas in pedagogical anthropology that we developed psychological anthropology as the content of psychological education and training of professional teachers [2-7; pp. 11-12]. The impetus for developing the methodology and theory of psychological anthropology was dissatisfaction with the structure and content of the traditional psychology course at a pedagogical university. Working as a teacher of psychology, and then as head of the psychology department at a pedagogical university, I had the opportunity to evaluate the practice of teacher training as a whole - in the ratio of its theoretical and practical components, psychological-pedagogical and subject-methodological training, and the nature of its organizational structure. The composition and scope of psychological disciplines in teacher training was significantly inferior to the composition and scope of his subject-methodological training, as well as the list of pedagogical disciplines in the curriculum. Moreover, psychology was taught in the junior years, and two pedagogical internships were conducted in the senior years of study.

In fact, practical training in psychology for students at a pedagogical university was limited to mastering psychological methods for studying the personality of a student and the class group, or more precisely, to compiling their psychological and pedagogical characteristics. V.P. Zinchenko, with his characteristic irony, quite accurately characterized the state of affairs in the practical psychological training of teachers, noting that «students» psychological practice was limited primarily to observing the work of the teacher and students in the classroom and writing student characteristics (often they resembled school essays dedicated to certain literary characters)” [1, p. 57].

Psychology teachers were particularly dissatisfied with the content of psychology courses. Textbooks on general, developmental, and educational psychology were prepared by teams of authors; they lacked a clear methodology and practical focus, and their "academic value" was limited to a few quizzes at the end of a topic. Psychology textbooks were more like simplified versions of the relevant scientific fields.

As a follower of L.S. Vygotsky's school of cultural-historical psychology and a student of the eminent Russian psychologist V.V. Davydov, I actively implemented the ideas of D.B. Elkonin and V.V. Davydov's developmental education in my research and teaching. I understood well that preparing teachers for developmental education requires qualitatively specific psychological knowledge—knowledge that is professionally oriented, systemic, and built on a unified methodology. K.D. Ushinsky's views on the need to develop comprehensive anthropological knowledge as the foundation of professional activity in education and on the place of psychology within it resonated with our research.

The first step toward creating a professionally oriented psychology was to substantiate its subject matter, one that would be understandable and internally accepted by future teachers. The general psychology definition of the subject of psychology as the psyche, a property of highly organized matter manifested in the body's ability to reflect the surrounding world, was perceived by future teachers as purely academic, unrelated to their professional attitudes and plans. A detailed exposition of the phylogeny of mental reflection—from earthworms to humans—at best piqued students' curiosity. The specificity of human psychology, in this presentation, was seen in the presence of the highest level of mental development—consciousness. What consciousness is, its structure, content, and representation in human life—textbooks remained silent on this, as the topic by this name was simply absent.

We advocate the idea of the need to include a course in Human Psychology in the curriculum for training future teachers, replacing the discipline General Psychology.^[1] We saw the special subjectivity of human psychology in the concept of «subjectivity» («subjective reality») introduced into scientific circulation by V.I. Slobodchikov [10]. In the course of many years of joint development, we built the structure and educational content of psychological anthropology, presented in three textbooks: «Human Psychology» (1995), «Psychology of Human Development» (2000), «Psychology of Human Education» (2013)^[2] [7; pp. 11-12]. In 1998, I defended my doctoral dissertation on the topic: «Fundamentals of Designing Psychological Education for Teachers,» which outlined the main provisions of psychological anthropology as the psychological basis of professional pedagogical activity and a component of pedagogical education.

How does psychological anthropology fundamentally differ from traditional psychology courses at pedagogical universities? First and foremost, in its methodology: we rejected the logic of including a limited number of individual psychological disciplines as adapted versions of scientific fields in the curriculum of psychological education. We developed a unique subject matter of psychological anthropology focused on the meaning and purpose of psychological knowledge in education and pedagogical activity—on substantiating the psychological and pedagogical conditions for the development of individuals in educational processes in the fullness of their human dignity and on equipping future teachers with the tools for developing professional activity. We deemed the development of the content of psychological education for teachers by including a limited number of psychological disciplines as adapted versions of psychological science in the curriculum to be futile and methodologically unsound. According to accepted standards, each branch of psychology—both theoretical and applied—is presented within the logic of research and description of its field of knowledge (object, subject, methods, ontology, theories, schemes, facts, etc.). This logic is intended for the scientific community and for researchers. Scientifically formulated psychological knowledge cannot be directly applied in teaching practice. We argue that the psychological education of teachers cannot be represented as a simple set of psychological disciplines reflecting the sectoral structure of psychological science. The psychological content of teacher training must represent a unified, internally coherent system of professionally oriented knowledge.

We assert that education is called upon to develop its own system of substantiating psychological knowledge. This is precisely the task we have addressed in the context of training professionals for developmental education. The concept of humanity is at the center of all three parts of the psychological anthropology we have developed. "Human Psychology" outlines the specific concepts of humanity in various fields of rational knowledge: Christian psychology, philosophical anthropology, the humanities, and the arts (fiction). Subjective reality is substantiated as the subject matter of human psychology, revealing the diversity of human facets—the study of humanity as an individual, as a subject, as a personality, as an individuality—and describing them in psychological terms.

The pedagogical significance of viewing humanity in its diversity is clear: the process of human education takes place within the unity and integrity of its qualities and attributes, and the goal of educational processes is to create the conditions for their development and growth. This understanding is especially important for future teachers to overcome the traditional education bias toward developing students' cognitive abilities solely through the acquisition of subject-specific knowledge.

Of fundamental importance in "Human Psychology" was the description of human otology. Community, activity, and consciousness were defined as attributes of the human way of being. It is important to instill in future educators an understanding that, in their human dignity, each person, throughout their entire life, is included in the community of others, actively interacts with the world, and is aware of the place and status of their existence and life.

This understanding and description of the human mode of existence is further developed and interpreted in understanding the patterns of human development and formation, presented in the following sections of psychological anthropology. The key concept in describing human development during ontogenesis in "The Psychology of Human Development" is the concept of event-based community—community with others based on joint, goal-oriented activity. People develop in community, learning from others and teaching others; they engage in this process with the full range of their human energies: motivation, emotions, will, cognition, action, and communication.

In psychological anthropology, we introduce the construct of the "age-normative development model" as a pedagogical interpretation of the concept of "developmental norm." A model (visual) representation of the developmental process at a specific stage of ontogenesis enables educators to see a holistic picture of the lines and content of subjective reality's development—the development of a person as a subject of communication in a community of peers and adults, as a subject of activity, and as a subject of consciousness [4].

The content of the age-normative model in a condensed (targeted) form is presented in the model of the educational process and pedagogical activity. The basis for constructing the model was the methodological distinction between the types of knowledge in education. G.P. Shchedrovitsky divided all knowledge functioning in pedagogical activity, in the processes of training and education, into knowledge about the object, which is transformed by the practitioner, and reflexive knowledge about the activity carried out by the practitioner [14, p. 91]. Knowledge about the object of pedagogical activity captures the natural life of the object, the features of its transformation and development, based on its internal logic and development patterns. Knowledge about pedagogical activity is knowledge about the subject of the activity, about the internal means of this activity. Knowledge about the object and knowledge about the activity are not isolated entities, but they capture different planes of analysis of pedagogical activity. The object presupposes the actions of the subject, the subject of the activity is unthinkable outside of action with the object. However, their specificity in pedagogical education is clearly revealed.

The implementation of the model of the educational process and pedagogical activity in pedagogical education allows us to maintain the unity of the goals and objectives of the development of students, their educational activity, joint educational activity and their own pedagogical activity. When designing the scenario of a specific lesson, the teacher must be aware of what he will receive as a result of development, what the student will do to achieve the educational result, how he will collaborate with students and what means (substantive, didactic, organizational, communicative) he has at his disposal for this [12]. In substantiating psychological knowledge as the basis of pedagogical professionalism, we attach great importance to the structure of psychological knowledge itself. In methodological works, a distinction is made between theoretical, project-based, practical and methodological psychological knowledge. As V.M. Rozin believes, "in psychology, in addition to science, it is necessary to talk, firstly, about psychological design, and secondly, about psychogogy..., i.e., a theoretical area that involves a person in working on himself and changing himself" [9, p. 15].

Theoretical psychological knowledge describes humans as they truly are, in their most essential, constant properties, qualities, and relationships. Theoretical psychological knowledge is knowledge about the real human being, existing in a specific culture and under specific historical conditions. Psychological theory presents a description of "humanity in general," in their generic essence and specificity, and establishes the ontological conditions of their existence and development.

But the specificity of human existence lies in the absence of natural predetermination in the formation and development of the individual. Each person must become a human being, cultivate themselves, and acquire an education. This requires an image or ideal that a person can follow, one that guides their life. A special task and function of psychological knowledge lies in the design and construction of this image of the human being, in indicating the paths and methods for the individual to realize their human essence. This is the primary purpose of psychology, integrated into the field of education, and psychology as a subject in pedagogical educational institutions. Psychological design knowledge is not so much a description of a real person as it is the construction of an image of a possible and desirable person.

Psychological knowledge is not merely a theory or project, but also a special kind of action, realized in psychological practice. The practical, vital significance of psychology lies in its transformative function, in providing individuals with the means to work on themselves, develop themselves, and manage their processes and states. Psychology constructs the individual, helps them understand and change themselves, and serves as a means of self-improvement. As V. Ya. Lyaudis notes, the uniqueness of psychological knowledge lies in the unity of theory and practice. Theoretical psychological knowledge in itself, without methods of action, is meaningless; it must be realized in the practice of behavior, in the techniques of self-improvement [8].

Three layers of psychology—psychological knowledge as theory, as a project, and as a practice—are integrated into a teacher's professional work in various ways. Teachers need to know and understand the psychological patterns of human life, to understand humans as a species. It is important for them to utilize theoretical and psychological knowledge in their teaching as the foundation and means for constructing and designing the educational process, the psychological conditions of learning and education, and understanding and developing children. Teachers must master psychological methods and techniques for self-improvement, regulating their mental states, and improving their professional performance. Multifunctionality and heterogeneity are the distinctive features of psychological knowledge integrated into teaching.

Distinguishing between types of knowledge in psychology forms the basis for various forms and methods of acquiring psychological knowledge in the professional training of teachers. Lectures and seminars are adequate forms of acquiring theoretical knowledge. Project-based psychological knowledge is acquired through practical classes and workshops. Practical and methodological psychological knowledge is honed in training sessions and during internships. It is also necessary to explore the potential of digital platforms and modern information technologies for acquiring psychological knowledge in all forms of classroom and extracurricular work for future teachers. Developing and implementing educational content covering all three types of psychological knowledge in teacher education represents a promising area for improving the training of professional personnel for developmental education.

An important task in the development of psychological anthropology as a new field of psychological science is related to its categorical justification—the description of its ontology, methodology, theory, technology, and practice. A categorically defined psychological anthropology can serve as a psychological justification for other humanities practices: healthcare, social services, law, physical education, and sports.

Literature

1. Zinchenko V.P. Psychology for Perestroika // Bulletin of Higher School. 1987. No. 7. P. 49-58.
2. Isaev E.I. Problems of designing psychological education for teachers // Questions of Psychology. 1997. No. 6. P. 48-56.
3. Isaev E.I. Theory and practice of psychological education of teachers // Psychological journal. 2000. No. 6. P. 57-66.
4. Isaev E.I. Educational Psychology. Textbook for Bachelors. Moscow: Yurait, 2014. 347 p.
5. Isaev E.I. Introduction to psychological and pedagogical anthropology. Moscow: FGBOU VO MGPPU, 2017. 180 p.
6. Isaev E.I., Slobodchikov V.I. Introduction to the anthropology of education: monograph. Birobidzhan: Publishing house of PSU named after Sholem Aleichem, 2012. 215 p.
7. Isaev E.I., Slobodchikov V.I. Psychology of human education: Formation of subjectivity in educational processes: Textbook. Moscow: Publishing house of PSTGU, 2013. 432 p.
8. Lyaudis V.Ya. Methods of Teaching Psychology. Moscow: Moscow State University Publishing House, 1989. 128 p.
9. Rozin V.M. Psychological practice. Moscow: ROU Publishing House, 1995. 158 p.
10. Slobodchikov V.I. Psychological problems of the formation of the human inner world // Questions of Psychology. 1996. No. 6. Pp. 14-23.
11. Slobodchikov V.I., Isaev E.I. Human Psychology: Introduction to the Psychology of Subjectivity: Textbook. Moscow: PSTGU Publishing House, 2013. 360 p.
12. Slobodchikov V.I., Isaev E.I. Psychology of human development: Development of subjective reality in ontogenesis: Textbook. Moscow: Publishing house of PSTGU, 2013. 400 p.
13. Ushinsky K.D. Pedagogical works: In 6 volumes. Moscow: Pedagogy, 1990. Vol. 5. 528 p.
14. Shchedrovitsky G.P. The system of pedagogical research (methodological analysis) // Pedagogy and logic. Moscow: Kastal, 1993. 416 p.
15. Shchedrovitsky G.P. Methodological organization of the sphere of psychology // Questions of methodology. 1997. No. 1-2. pp. 108-127.

References

1. Zinchenko VP. (1987) Psychology — Restructuring. Higher School Bulletin, no. 7, pp. 49–58.
2. Isaev EI. (1997) Problems of designing a teacher's psychological education. Psychology issues, no. 6, pp. 48–56.
3. Isaev EI. (2000) Theory and practice of teacher's psychological education. Psychological Journal, no. 6, pp. 57–66.
4. Isaev EI. (2014) Pedagogical psychology. Baccalaureate textbook. Moscow: Yurajt, 347 p.
5. Isaev EI. (2017) Introduction to Psychological-Pedagogical Anthropology [Pedagogical psychology. Baccalaureate textbook]. M.: FGBOU VO MGPPU, 2017. 180 p.
6. Isaev EI, Slobodchikov VI. (2012) Introduction to the anthropology of education: monograph. Birubani: Sholom Alejhem PSU Publishing House, 215 p.
7. Isaev EI, Slobodchikov VI. (2013) Psychology of Human Education: Becoming Subjective in Educational Processes: Textbook [Psychology of Human Education: Becoming Subjective in Educational Processes: Textbook]. Moscow: PSTGU Publishing House, 432 p.
8. Lyaudis V.YA. (1989) Methodology for teaching psychology [Methodology for teaching psychology]. Moscow: MGU Publishing House, 128 p.
9. Rozin VM. (1995) Psihologicheskaya praktika [Psychological practice]. M.: Izd-vo ROU, 158 p.
10. Slobodchikov VI. (1996) Psychological problems of the formation of the inner world of man. Psychology issues, no. 6, pp. 14–23.
11. Slobodchikov VI, Isaev EI. (2013) Human Psychology: Introduction to the Psychology of Subjectivity: Textbook [Human Psychology: Introduction to the Psychology of Subjectivity: Textbook]. Moscow: PSTGU Publishing House, 360 p.
12. Slobodchikov VI, Isaev EI. (2013) Psychology of human development: Development of subjective reality in ontogenesis: Textbook [Psychology of human development: Development of subjective reality in ontogenesis: Textbook]. Moscow: PSTGU Publishing House, 400 p.
13. Ushinskij KD. (1990) Pedagogical essays: In 6 volumes. Moscow: Pedagogika, Vol. 5, 528 p.
14. Shchedrovickij GP. (1993) System of pedagogical research (methodological analysis) [System of pedagogical research (methodological analysis)]. Pedagogy and logic [Pedagogy and logic]. Moscow: Kastal, 416 p.
15. Shchedrovickij GP. (1997) Metodological organization of the field of psychology. Methodology issues, no. 1-2. pp. 108-127.

[1] «Human Psychology» as an academic discipline was included in the curricula of pedagogical universities in 1995.

[2] Recommended by the Ministry of Education as teaching aids for students of pedagogical universities.