The Cultural Approach to Teaching

PROFESSIONAL CULTURE AS PART OF

THE PERSONALITY’S CULTURE

The Cultural Approach to Teaching

Now in the theory and practice of professional pedagogical education many authors address to the cultural approach: professional activities of the person are considered in the context of general philosophical understanding of culture, and as the important component of educational process which is manifested in mastering professional-pedagogical culture acts by the prospective teacher. Culture is a broad concept that embraces all aspects of human life. It includes everything people learn to do. It is everything humans have learnt. Culture shapes our thoughts and actions.

Of its several meanings, two are of major importance to teachers (N. Brooks, 1975). Hearthstone or “little-c” culture: culture as everything in human life (also called culture BBV: Beliefs, Behavior, and Values). Olympian or “big-C” culture: the best in human life restricted to the elitists (also called culture MLA: great Music, Literature, and Art of the country). We should realize that knowing the language, as well as the patterns of everyday life, is a prerequisite to appreciating fine arts and literature, therefore we need a balanced perspective of culture when designing curricula.

The understandings of culture can be reduced to the two basic ones: culture is the entire continuum of economic, industrial, social and spiritual achievements; culture is a high level of development achieved. In both definitions, culture is viewed as an attribute of activities.

Yet, there is a difference: in the first instance, the bearers of culture are human communities / society, and the term reflects the result of human activity. Here, culture is understood as a set of behavioral patterns and values, a world outlook, customs and traditions, a set of societal rules for behaviour. Consequently, culture can be defined as the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another. Thus, taking into account the key values that regulate the relations / interaction of the humans involved we can speak of different paradigms of pedagogical thought or pedagogical culture types.

As for the second definition, it focuses on the individual as the bearer of culture. Here, culture defines activity as a process characterized by different levels of excellence / achievement. Hence, we speak of the “high level of development” or “skill”. This understanding of culture brings it close to such categories as “competence”, “qualification”, “skill / mastery”, “excellence”, and “professionalism”.

The concept of culture has long been system-forming in social science. Pedagogy, however, has not been part of the general trend, characterized in the humanities by attaching the ever increasing importance to culture. Only a few researchers (M. N. Skatkin, V. V. Krayevsky, I. J. Lerner) have successfully employed the concept of general culture in developing educational systems, or determining the content component of education. At present, E. V. Bondarevskaya and her disciples use the concept of pedagogical culture to characterize the quality of education in the context of society (“pedagogical reality”) on the whole as well as some of its processes and phenomena. Education is a social process, and children are not “products,” but part of the continuum of society.

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