Universiteto dėstytojų motyvuoto sprendimo priėmimas: empatija ir apatija

Abstract

Basis of building the great university lies in enthusiastic teachers, managers and administrative staff of university who are full of creative and responsible energy and strong motivation. Because the prior task of universities is to cultivate the competences of students, in addition to perfect expert knowledge, the teachers have to put into their educative effort also a special personal insert. This insert is based on and given through the teacher’s empathy and individual approach to students. However, current motivation of academicians struggles with many problems and barriers that are connected with an acceleration of societal and academic environs. University teachers have to cope with an increasing amount of scientific monographs, papers and studies needed for their best as possible preparation of the lectures and seminars, setup the new scientific projects, and permanent development of their own professionality and personality. They are often overburden, tired, and burned-out. In some moments of their professional life, university teachers face the difficult decisional problem: to continue in empathy towards students or start to be apathetic. Therefore, the introductive and theoretical part of paper analyze, synthetize, compare, and generalize the known on empathy and apathy, viewed both from the perspective of teachers’ decision making (prefer rather apathy versus fight with tiredness and prefer rather empathy). Empirical-analytic part presents the results of questionnaire survey performed on the sample of 150 students of the University of Žilina (Slovak Republic) which was focused on searching the students’ expressions on the application of individual (empathetic) approach of teachers to them. Because the obtained results underline the importance of empathy, final part of the study defines the relationship between teacher and students as a multidimensional, dynamic and accelerating relationship. This relationship would fulfill a psychological-personality, developmental-cultivation, cognitive mental, communicational-argumentation, and motivational-acceleration dimensions.