Academic class as a platform for raising learners’ sociocultural maturity
Abstract
The article deals with raising students’ sociocultural maturity. The humanities academic classes are considered as a platform for encouraging students to develop their social and cultural skills, with particular attention given to classes where the foreign language is taught. The choice of the theme is determined by the necessity to improve the situation with the level of graduates’ cultural literacy and sociocultural skills, which accounts for the relevance of the given paper whose subject matter is viewed on the background of the current crisis of culture.
Considered inseparable from society, culture as a topic has recently been developed in many directions and with enough vigour. Considerable literature on the theory of and methods for teaching foreign languages witnesses educators’ interest, both empirical and theoretical, in engaging a variety of culture-related aspects in the learning process.
We assume that a foreign language course has a great potential to serve as an efficient means for strengthening the «friendship» between the curricular disciplines of natural and technical specialisms and the humanities. To this end, it is significant to review the position occupied by the humanities in the curriculum and give them a due weight in education process. So far, the curricular subjects concerned with the way people think and behave are seriously underrated. However, language and literature, history and philosophy and other humanities disciplines make up a powerful arsenal contributing to enhancing the individual’s sociocultural awareness and improving the respective skills, without which no one could be considered a civilized person and human at all.
In discussing the main points of the given article we are based on the views of two world’s most original literary scholars writing today – Mikhail Epstein and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht. They both argue that the humanities are bound to increase enhance their intellectual impact on society. We accept Gumbrecht’s concept – the dimension of «presence», in which cultural phenomena and cultural events become tangible and have an impact on our senses and our bodies. Proposing putting the dimension of presence at the center of academic practice, we highlight the far-reaching effect of the presence of a qualified and culturally developed instructor. It is this understanding of the teacher’s presence that serves as a prerequisite for encouraging appropriate sociocultural education of the motivated learners.
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References
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