COMPETENCES OF YOUNG UNIVERSITY TEACHERS IN THE ERA OF COGNITIVE REVOLUTION

Abstract

Background. The changing goals of higher education and expectations from the university graduates with the advent of Industry 4.0 particularly acutely raise the problem of university teachers' competences. In scientific and pedagogical literature, the problem of defining the young university teachers’ competences remains insufficiently developed due to various methodological approaches and pedagogical traditions in most countries, in which the differences in requirements for experienced and novice teachers are limited only to qualification indicators. Today, in the era of cognitive revolution, new data have emerged, which allow to take an innovative look at the possibilities of forming the personal and professional competences of young teachers in the context of developing the value-semantic attitudes of the individual who will have to work in the future and solve educational problems that are only taking shape under the influence of such processes as globalization, geopolitical conflicts, widespread digitalization, introduction of artificial intelligence, etc. Purpose. To identify the attitude of young university teachers towards the role of personal and professional competences in their teaching activities, determining their priority. Materials and methods. The methodological basis for the study is composed by the competence-based, system approaches, and ideas of cognitive pedagogy, which helped to identify the attitude of young teachers to competences of different levels. A complex of theoretical (analysis of scientific literature, generalization, comparison) and empirical methods (observation, content analysis of Internet sources, express survey on the Google platform) were used. The article provides a scientific analysis of the degree of development of the problem based on an extensive field of domestic and foreign publications. Results. The experimental work to determine the attitude of young teachers to the competences necessary for their teaching activities began with an analysis of the qualitative composition of the contingent of this professional group, which showed that it is extremely heterogeneous in terms of pedagogical training and focusing on continuous teaching at the university. We were able to identify three main subgroups among young teachers: graduates of pedagogical universities, postgraduate students in technical fields, teachers with an academic degree. To obtain a clear idea of ​​​​the content and types of personal and professional competences, all participants of the experiment were asked to join three events that could help in developing of the cognitive, practical and evaluative components of the attitude of young teachers to competences under the study. The participants were asked to choose from a list, which we compiled, including 35 items and representing global, personal, psychological and pedagogical, organizational and methodological, digital, social, communicational, and research competences those, which were the most significant for them. The choice made by the young teachers with and without teaching experience varied significantly, reflecting the primary goals pursued by each group. Because the respondents did not have basic pedagogical education, their attitude to competencies did not imply a combination of educational, developmental and educational goals in the teacher’s activities, which cannot but cause concern in the process of striving to improve the quality of the educational process in higher education.

Keywords

• higher education
• young university teacher
• university teacher’s competences
• global competence
• soft skills
• key competences