Features of the formation of life and professional plans of school students during environmental education

Abstract

The article highlights the peculiarities of forming life and professional plans of schoolchildren in the context of environmental education. It is determined that life plans are much broader and include professional plans as one of their components. It is explained that a life plan is an image of a desired, meaningful future, which includes the professional future of a person as a labour subject. It is proved that life and professional plans are closely related to such personality characteristics as motives, interests, inclinations, values, orientations, orientation of self-awareness, etc.
It is noted that environmental education is one of the development strategies and a continuous process of education and upbringing of an individual aimed at forming a system of knowledge, skills, value orientations, moral, ethical and aesthetic relations which ensure the environmental responsibility of an individual and society as a whole for the state and improvement of the environment. This position allows us to perceive environmental education as an important means of shaping the life and professional plans of schoolchildren.
The criteria for the formation of life and professional plans in the context of continuous environmental
education are allocated: motivational and value; cognitive; and activity. The content of the criteria and indicators for assessing the level of formation of life and professional plans of schoolchildren has its own characteristics in the context of environmental education. When determining the criteria and their components for the formation of life and professional plans of school students, as well as for the selection of the content of environmental education, it is taken into account that students need not only to form systems of environmental knowledge about the interaction of living beings and the environment, but also environmentally appropriate behaviour that allows them to realise their involvement in the development of nature, as well as the understanding that deviations from the general principles of nature’s existence are dangerous and have a detrimental effect on both nature and humans. Thus, environmental awareness is a systemic element in the formation of students’ life and professional plans in the process of environmental education.