Possible Methods of Developing Creative Professional Thinking at a Technical University
Recently there has been growing interest in applying folklore and related forms of professional writing in the educational sphere. There are several reasons for this tendency, and the major one is the quality of thinking of high school graduates who plan to enter a university. The transition to the Unified State Examination system (USE) in Russia was not a simple technical transition from one way of entering university to another. This system was believed to be fair and simplified compared to the previous one. The subsequent changes showed, however, that it was a way to change the educational paradigm. The former principle “to teach students how to think” was smoothly transformed into the canon “to give students readily available thoughts or to teach them how to search for necessary information by using the advantages of information technologies”. Students ' consciousness was adjusted to the fact that “in the mass consumption society, everyone can find what they are looking for if they know where and how to search”. As a result, the compulsory education was on a par with the pop culture satisfying personal needs to have something here and now. It is difficult for students to move from sensual concreteness to abstract concreteness, from conceiving to concepts. The transition of thinking from the consumer orientation to the producer orientation is achieved through the complexities of activating students' creativity. One of the ways that can make this transition easier is the study of traditional forms of art and folklore. They are able to push a student's consciousness into the reorientation towards an active attitude to life, to give a clear understanding of advantages of a creative process over searching for something that has already been done. The article devotes special attention to the possible incorporation of the tales written by P. P. Bazhov into the educational process in higher education institutions. The authors regard the tales to be a synthesized artistic way of improving the work of consciousness towards developing a world outlook that reflects the specifics of national existence, and a tool for the formation of multidimensional and polymorphic thinking oriented simultaneously to the national past and the present time. Tales, in a philosophical aspect, are an effective means of forming such concepts as “being” and “reality”, “objectivity of the truth” and “subjectivity of its understanding”.