Abstract:

Modern economy has determined formation of new requirements for graduates of higher educational institutions, among which is the demand for systematically organized intellectual, communicative, reflective, self-organising, and moral principles, which allow for successful organising of activities in a broad social, economic, and cultural context, use of knowledge, skills, and attitudes in everyday and new life situations. It has recently become a trend for graduates to do jobs in the spheres not related to their degree, thus here arises need for expansion of the competence model.

Findings show that many graduates (according to our data, about 36%) of the Faculty of Design, Kazan Federal University, Russia, due to high competition in the labour market, get jobs in educational institutions, for example, primary and secondary schools, art schools, and children’s art schools. In this regard, the problem of forming a cluster of pedagogical competences at the stage of professional training in university is seen as important. The cluster must incorporate professionally significant attitudes and personal qualities, theoretical knowledge, professional skills, orientation to the values of the profession of a teacher.

Our previous study has shown that value orientations of modern students as representatives of the youth environment differ from the value orientations of the older generation, here represented by the teachers of comprehension and art schools. The student’s system of values mainly focuses on a person – their achievements, welfare, interests, while the teachers are focused on social and spiritual values.

The system-forming component of the cluster of pedagogical competences is the spiritual and moral component reflecting the formation of spiritual and moral culture of the individual and determining the student’s ability to comprehend the spiritual and moral content of scientific and educational information, development of their spiritual and moral potential in the process of forming scientific worldview and vocational training. Such like approach is explained by the fact that the spiritual and moral culture as a system of views on the world and the place of a person in it determines the person’s attitude to the surrounding reality and themselves from the standpoint of traditional spiritual and moral values; it provides storage, transmission of information from generation to generation and implementation of the programme of spiritual and moral development of human potential and its preservation in an era of rapid technological change; it advocates a sustainable basis for the conveyance of traditional values; it ensures human security in the emerging polycentric world.

The authors of the article have conducted a study to determine the content of the spiritual and moral component of the cluster of pedagogical competences and to reveal its role in the system of value orientations of Design Studies students at Kazan Federal University, Russia. We have proposed ways to optimize the process of teacher training for academic students and substantiated a set of pedagogical conditions for the optimization of this process in Russian universities.