Identification of key narratives to assess students’ perception of social reality

Introduction. The article presents the results of the research investigation on identifying key narratives in the perception of the external social environment by university students on the example of St. Petersburg Peter the Great Polytechnic University (hereinafter referred to as SPbPU). The aim of the article is to identify key narratives (images of the present, past, and future) to assess students’ perception of social reality, to substantiate key needs of students in the field of soft skills development and to summarize the practices in the field of teaching these skills in SPbPU. Materials and Methods. The key methods of obtaining research data include the survey, participant observation of the research team members within the framework of professional activities, analysis of documents on the issues of teaching and assessment of teaching Soft Skills disciplines. The methods of semantic analysis, generalization, comparison, data visualization, and verification were used in order to collect data, process and present them. Results. The authors identified key narratives in the perception of the external social environment by university students, including peculiarities of the perception of enlarged groups in social, humanitarian and technical fields of study. The data on the key needs of young people within the framework of Soft Skills acquisition and the experience of implementing such disciplines on the example of SPbPU were generalized. During the study, a search semantic analysis of existing evaluative acronyms was applied to investigate the existing image of reality perception in the target group, and the DICE acronym was introduced to summarize the desired image of the future in university students. The practical results of the research consist in the possibilities to assess the potential of practices in the disciplines within the framework of «Soft Skills» in SPbPU and modernization of similar practices in other universities. Conclusions. The article concludes about the need to build an effective feedback system with university students, which will allow, based on specialized Soft Skills practices, to respond flexibly to needs in the field of deficit skills and competencies of students and ensure their acquisition. In addition, the importance of identifying the existing narratives in the youth environment in the field of perception of social environment and social time to realize the educational, communicative and moral functions of higher education institutions is shown.