| Abstract [eng] |
The great importance is given to the 21st century’s university and the education it provides to the individual. In the system of higher education students get special attention, because while learning in knowledge and information society, one has to be able to use the information and skills individually in order for them to help to accept and overcome the occurring difficulties that appear in the society. For student to achieve the highest results in his/hers learning period and also to successfully use the knowledge one gets in practical activities, it is important to mention the sense of academic identity which appears when a student starts to feel that he/she is a part of a certain culture and/or organization, in this case, a member of academic community. Academic identity is essentially important, because in this context both community and the members, have to give the meaning to their actions. Such students’ involvement into academic community is an educational task, therefore it has to be solved with an educational measures. This study was carried out in Kaunas University of Technology, Faculty of Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities. In this study the problematic questions are as follows: 1. What causes the formation of student’s academic identity? 2. What impact on the building of academic identity does the potentional and educational environments that could be found in the faculty have? 3. How these potentional and educational environments appear in non-formal physical spaces of the faculty and do they really have any influence on the formation of academic identity? 4. What information on values can be found in these physical spaces/corridors? These questions create the scientific problem that this thesis tries to solve. This work only includes the non-formal educational (that are not directly linked to the study program) tools. The main object of the research is non-formal physical educational and potentional environments and their formation factors. The aim is to highlight the importance of university’s non-formal potentional learning environments, also identify the elements/factors of physical spaces that lead to the expression of the educational environments which not only help to understand the academic values that are advocated in the university, but also cherish them and motivate to feel the sense of academic generality. The objectives are as follows: to justify how the discovered factors influence the formation of students’ academic identity in the context of working non-formal educational and potentional learning environments in the faculty of university, also to justify the research methodology of the factors of formation of these academic identity’s environments in non-formal spaces of the faculty and check the influence of parameters (measures) to the formation of students’ academic identity. In order to have the validity and the objectivity of the information, the principle of triangulation has been applied to this case study. The necessary information was collected from various sources, also using different methods that are as follows: scientific literature analysis, case study (document analysis, observation and semi-structured interviews), the obtained data criteria-analysis. Although the theoretical part of this thesis is based on Community of Practise model, while empirically determining the effectiveness of this model, the emphasis was put on the parameters that influence the students' academic identity formation in the informal physical spaces of the faculty. The research shows that this is a complex process. This study helps to answer the question of what should be an informal educational environment that would provide academic values, thus contributing to the creation and development of the academic community and its identity. |
