Gender Aspect Of Lecturer’s Image At The Departmental Educational Organization

Abstract

The purpose of the study is to identify the gender aspects of lecturer’s image at the departmental educational organization. Two groups of people were studied: the first group was a scientific pedagogical staff of the Far Eastern MIA Law Institute. The Bem Sex-Role Inventory (BSRI) and T. Leary's method of Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality were used. The BSRI allowed to identify the prevailing gender characteristics of the individual; T. Leary's method allowed to diagnose interpersonal relationships singling out such qualities as self-confidence, credulity, responsiveness, leadership, insistence, scepticism, kindness, pliancy. The second group consisted of cadets who were offered a list of questions connected with such aspects of lecturer and police officer’s image as informal communication, proneness to conflict, working capacity, tendency to management and cooperation, emotionality. The obtained results showed that gender differences in behavior were much smaller than in the stereotypes, thus, the subjects couldn’t assume they had "exclusively male" or "exclusively female" qualities. It was revealed that men’s insistence and leadership were brighter, female lecturers were rather emotional, male lecturers’ professional qualities were most noteworthy, male cadets had difficulties communicating with female lecturers. The studies confirmed that gender aspect was revealed in students and educators’ subjective judgments.

Keywords: Educational organizationgender aspectimagestudentlecturer

Introduction

Since the establishment of educational organizations of higher education all subjects of pedagogical activity have been analyzing the image of the lecturer. Much attention has been paid to the professional and personal qualities that allowed to assess the skill of the person giving knowledge. The harmonious combination of the inner world of the lecturer with his/her professional qualities and appearance creates a positive or negative image of the lecturer at higher educational establishments.

The positive image of the lecturer at the educational organization of higher education is important both at the state and at the personal level. For the state, improving the image of the lecturer is connected with the growth of public confidence in the profession, acquisition of knowledge, promotion of professional excellence. Concerning higher educational establishments, the image increases the motivation of students to learn, improves their perception of the lecturer. For the individual, the Image building is associated with an optimistic world outlook, respect for the chosen profession.

Traditionally in the history of reflections on Pedagogy the image of the teacher was associated with a male. At the same time, more attention was paid to his intellectual abilities, speaking skills, the ideas and views that he tried to convey to his students. In the 20th century, women became lecturers in higher education. The assessment of their appearance and behavior was added to that of the assessment of intellectual abilities and speaking skills. Thus, the traditional image of the "genderless" lecturer can no longer meet the needs of the pedagogical process of higher education in the current circumstances.

Over the past decade of the 20 ^th century the studies of the theory of image, the image building of the individuals in senior posts were conducted in Russia. The process of image building of future specialists in the education system of the higher education institution is studied in various fields of science. Besides, scientific researches of the image of the lecturer at the higher educational establishments and the high school teacher have been started ( Bunchuk & Petkov, 2016). However, the researchers consider the gender specificity of the lecturer's personality without taking into account the specific nature of perception at the departmental educational organization.

Problem Statement

At the departmental educational organizations of law enforcement agencies, which were originally male in their pedagogical staff, the appearance of female officers caused difficulties in determining the constituent elements of their image. On the one hand, they had their image to embody the professional qualities of the law enforcement officers, and, on the other, to demonstrate their belonging to female gender. This means that a female lecturer had to maintain her masculine and feminine balance in the process of building her image.

The position of male lecturers in the 21 ^stcentury is complicated by the fact that contemporary pedagogical techniques are focused on building partnership between the lecturer and the student, while any enforcement structure possesses an undivided authority and a strict chain of command, and is based on the unequal relationships.

Image building results from a complex psychological process of the object perception. It includes rational actions such as assessment of sociability, generosity, honesty and other qualities, and unconscious ones, such as "reading" sign information. The rational assessment of the image also refers to the correlation of the individual with his/her profession. For example, the image of the lecturer of Humanities has no gender marker, unlike such disciplines as Crime Detection or Special Training and Tactics, which is thought to have a clear masculine component. Among the sign tools of image building one can distinguish language tools (speech), proxemics (body position in space), kinetic tools (facial expressions, gestures), person’s appearance (clothing).

In connection with the foregoing, there is a problem of building a positive image of the lecturer at the departmental educational organization taking into account the gender aspect.

Research Questions

The gender aspect availability in the image of a lecturer at the departmental educational organization. Of what elements it consists in the perception of cadets and lecturers and officers.

Purpose of the Study

It is necessary to determine gender aspects of the image of the lecturer, working at the departmental educational organization, by reference to the example of the MIA higher educational establishment of the Russian Federation.

Research Methods

To determine the gender characteristics of the image of the lecturer at the departmental educational organization, the research of two groups of people has been conducted.

The first group consisted of the representatives of a scientific pedagogical staff of the Far Eastern Law Institute of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation. It consisted of 40 women and 40 men who were in the positions of lecturers, senior lecturers and associate professors, have at least three years of pedagogic service and the officer rank of the police captain or higher. To study their gender characteristics the Bem Sex-Role Inventory (BSRI) and T. Leary's method of the Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality were used.

The BSRI allows to reveal the prevailing gender characteristics of a personality within the framework of masculine, androgynous and feminine traits ( Zayarskaya, 2016).

T. Leary's method has been developed to diagnose interpersonal relationships and all owsto determine 8 groups of traits, such as self-confidence, credulity, responsiveness, leadership, insistence, skepticism, kindness and pliancy, basing on 128 features-assertions.

The second group consisted of 91 cadets (39 girls and 52 boys) from the first to the fourth course of the Far Eastern Law Institute of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation. They were offered a list of 15 questions concerning different aspects of the image of the lecturer and police officer – informal communication, proneness to conflict, working capacity, tendency to management and cooperation, emotionality.

A parallel study of this kind allows to assess the image of the lecturer both externally and internally, i.e. the qualities of the personality and the assessment of these qualities by others ( Avakyan & Vinogradova, 2019).

Findings

These studies of the masculinity, androgyny and femininity levels, obtained from the BSRI, are summarized in the Table 01 .

The studies, presented in the Table 1 , also reveal that according to the Student-Fisher r-criterion there has been no significant difference between the results of the two groups of officers-lecturers. This is due to the fact that gender differences in behavior are much smaller than it has stereotyped in the popular consciousness. It is also possible to assume that persistence of gender-based stereotypes make it impossible for the test subjects even to admit that there are "exclusively male" or "exclusively female" qualities among their personality traits ( Gutsu & Chilipenok, 2018; Naumov & Savitski, 2019).

Table 2 presents the indicators of male and female lecturers’ gender qualities, obtained by T. Leary’smethod ( Leary, 1957).

As can be seen from the Table 2 , there are differences in such scales as insistence and leadership. In male lecturers, these qualities are much more pronounced than in females.

The data obtained by T. Leary’s method are virtually equivalent to the results obtained in 2011 by Golovneva ( 2011), who used this method among ordinary men and women, without taking into account their professional characteristics. This could lead to the conclusion that men demonstrate such qualities as demanding and leadership brighter than women, regardless of the profession ( Ignatieva, Vilkova, Timofeeva, Donskova, & Smorodinskova, 2018). The difference lies in the fact that male officers express their insistence1 point higher than the representatives of other professions do.

Processing of the cadets’ survey showed the following results. The question «Does the lecturer’s gender matter to you? » was responded in the negative by 55% of test subjects. Nevertheless, when analyzed from the standpoint of gender division, the majority of the male cadets’ answers indicated that the lecturer’s gender did matter for them. However, the next question «Does your commanding officer’s gender matter? » was responded in the negative by 64% of test subjects responded negatively and 52% of female cadets responded in the positive. The question «Is it difficult for you to receive commands from a female police officer? » was responded in the positive by 10% of female cadets and 62% of male cadets. When analyzing three of the provided answers a pattern was revealed that that the gender of the lecturer did matter to male cadets and it was difficult for them to receive commands from female officers. From female cadets’ point of view, a commanding officer’s gender mattered more than that of a lecturer ( Neyaskina, Kadyrov, & Kapustina, 2019).

Let us concentrate on the reasons that male cadets consider gender and related gender aspects of knowledge transfer to be meaningful, and female cadets take into consideration the gender characteristics of a commanding officer.

67% of all respondents noted that female lecturers paid more attention to informal communication in the team and building interpersonal relationships, but at the same time 90% of cadets believed that female lecturers were more prone to conflict in the educational process. 75% of respondents said that female lecturers tended to view their students' success more as that of their personal one. At the same time, 60% of respondents noted that they imposed higher professional requirements on male lecturers, placing higher moral and ethical demands on female lecturers. 71% of respondents stated that female lecturers had less control over their emotions during the training sessions ( Kyishtyimova, 2015).

Meanwhile, 62% of respondents believed that female lecturers were more engaged in additional work, and 69% of respondents said that they were working to the full extent of their capacities. However, 100% of respondents indicated that the gender of the educator did not affect his/her professionalism.

Thus, the answers of cadets lead to the following conclusions:

• The gender stereotype of increased emotionality of female lecturers is confirmed among students.

• The professional qualities of male lecturers deserve cadets’ greatest attention, not the moral ones.

• The increased emotionality and personal entry into the profession make it more complicated for male cadets to communicate with a female lecturer.

Conclusion

The studies have confirmed that the image of the lecturer at the departmental educational organization has a gender aspect. It manifests itself both in the perception-based assessments of lecturers themselves (increased Insistence and leadership of male lecturers) and cadets. The gender aspect of the image of a male lecturer and police officer consists of attention drawn to the professional knowledge and merit, the ability to lead, minimal emotionality and proneness to conflict as well as ability to keep distance in interpersonal relationships. The gender aspect of the female lecturer and police officer is increased emotionality, androgyny behavior distancing herself from masculinization and feminization, increased moral requirements ( Shkurko, 2018).

References

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