Humanitarization of technical university education: effective strategies and practices

Abstract

Last changes in the education system impose certain requirements for the training of technical specialties students, taking into account individual – personal characteristics, social orders of regions, countries, as well as international integration processes. Due to such trends, the humanitarization of technical education can become multidimensional and predictive. The article is aimed at identifying and analyzing the dominant strategies for the humanitarization of higher education of technical students through the prism of universal competencies. The set of methods was used to the analysis of the humanitarization’s strategies of higher education of technical students: the case-study method, the object – Ural Federal University (Ekaterinburg, Russia); method for obtaining and analyzing primary and secondary data. Based on the system and structural-functional approaches, not only strategies are considered, but also such forms of their implementation as purposeful efforts (in educational activities) and spontaneous practices (in extracurricular activities). Research results: the ratio of "4 C's" competencies, the group of universal competencies and universal competencies in accordance with the Federal State Educational Standard for Higher Education (version 3++) is found; taking into account the data from the Atlas of new professions, the connection of the competence group "4 C's" with soft skills required in the professions of technical industries is revealed; effective strategies and practices are identified, including the mandatory bachelor's degree "core" of humanities studies for technical specialties; the role of the center for the universal competencies development as a university structural unit for the promotion of humanitarian minors is justified; the resource of the institute of mentoring and supervision, student scientific, social, and creative associations in the formation of the humanitarian environment of the university is revealed.

Environmental Behavior of Youth and Sustainable Development

“…Humanistic values are of particular importance as criteria for practice or as a measure of correlation with activity goals. Therefore, humanitarian values and soft skills are relevant today in the model of formed competencies of a modern graduate of schools and universities [15][16][17]. People's perception of nature determines their relationship to nature and their emotional connection with nature.…”

Propósitos humanísticos y utilitarios de la educación superior en el contexto del enfoque de competencia: presentación del problema

“…An extensive amount of literature (in particular, Dyachkova, Novgorodtseva, & Tomyuk, 2020;Kukkola, 2016;Shutaleva, Kerimov, & Tsiplakova, 2019) is devoted to the problem of promoting of the traditional mission of universities. We agree with the opinion of these scientists about the need for this promotion, but we do not share their pessimism about the obstacles on this road.…”

Engineering thinking and its role in modern industry

“…In our research, we proceed from understanding engineering thinking as a systemic one at its core. Therefore, the formation of engineering design thinking [1], universal competencies [2,3], among which the following competencies are of particular importance: communicative competencies [4][5][6][7], systems thinking [8], media education [9], team and individual project work [10][11][12], legal knowledge [13,14], knowledge of socio-humanitarian concepts [15,16] and the ability to apply them in practice. Engineering thinking allows seeing the multidimensionality of the problem (system), its parts (subsystems), their interconnection, as well as its place as a whole (supersystem).…”