ALGORITHMS OF THE UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR’S IMAGE IMPROVING IN A CONTEXT OF PEDAGOGICAL BRANDING

The article emphasizes the need for purposeful formation of the university professor’s image as an important condition for the formation of his personal brand. The relationship between concepts “the image of profession” and “the prestige of profession” is specified. The author specifies four types of images that interact in a university professor’s professional activity – ideal, desired, real, and mirror. Ideal image reflects the features of an exemplary specialist, desired image shows the results of comparing constructs of ideal image with the professional potential of the brand holder to bring them to maximum compliance, real image highlights the current image of the specialist in the imagination of the target audience, and mirror image is a manifestation of self-image, based on the subject’s own perception of the real image of the university professor. “Values shared by the individual” and “values-attitudes” as potential guidelines for university professor’s branding initiatives are differentiated in the article. It is argued the inexpediency of the fact that some scientists recognize the habitual image of a university professor’s image as a dominant element. It is proved that determinants of university professor’s image improving in the context of pedagogical branding are: extrapolation of positive properties of the university professor’s profession image to the professor’s image; regular fixation of systematically achieved intermediate goals, the number and sequence of which clearly correspond to the specifics of movement to the goal of branding; activation of the proxematic channel of non-verbal communication in learning, as well as the paralinguistic and extralinguistic components of paraverbal communication with the student target audience. Three algorithms of purposeful university professor’s image improvement in a context of pedagogical branding are substantiated. The effectiveness of the application of these algorithms in university professors’ professional activity has been tested through a pedagogical experiment. Keywords: image; university professor; image of profession; prestige of profession; personal brand; algorithm; brand-communication; pedagogical branding.