EDUCATIONAL READING AS A SOURCE FORMING PSYCHOLOGISTS’ COMPETENCES FOR UNDERSTANDING AND ACCEPTANCE OF «THE OTHER»
The experimental study of students-psychologists’ educational reading is presented; its aim was to reveal the students’ ability to be open to understanding and to accept psychological ideas different from their own. The changes in the students’ personality-related perceptions in the process of their interaction with the educational text are described. The master students in psychological specialties are characterized by mainly ordinary ideas on psychological reality. They show two strategies of work with a scientific text: 1) focus on selection as many previously unknown words in the text as possible and memorizing them; 2) focus on selection of several key, systemic concepts and understanding of the text through their prism. The master’s students are characterized by prevailing orientation on understanding the information presented in the educational text. Students of the second stage of higher education show significant difficulties in reconstructing the psychological reality from the standpoint of a given psychological theory. They tend to attribute their own ideas to the text author, to ignore the author’s unique thinking and to use formally or fragmentarily the author’s conceptual apparatus. Instead of reconstructing an event, they offer characteristics or diagnoses. The students’ understanding of a position of the text author (“the Other”) leads most often only to insignificant changes in the student’s understanding of psychological reality. Such changes are revealed not so much in the qualitative transformation of the students’ picture of the world but in the enrichment of their ideas with new aspects of this picture. It is noted that at training of students in psychological specialties, special pedagogic activities are needed to form their philological competences in working with text.