Nowadays, training tourism professionals requires, among other things, the formation of professional reflective competence that includes professional cultural identity as its value component. The formal logic of scientific knowledge taught to university students creates an image of seeming isolation and separation of science from general culture. However, one of the functions of the scientific representation of the world is to provide the objectification and understanding of the related scientific knowledge and their inclusion in the culture. One of the technologies to achieve this is the reflective-dialogical approach associated with the development of a creative orientation of the subject of scientific and practical knowledge, and equipped with special means for understanding of one’s own self, one’s own activities and cultural identity.

Even a very refined and formalized knowledge is represented by the words of an intermediary – a teacher acting as a cultural mediator and taking the student as a subject of scientific knowledge out of the closed structure of science. Cultural mediators involved in the process of scientific cognition in university allow students (as subjects of scientific knowledge dwelling in various scientific discourses) to find common ground for building event communication through metaphor.

We have conducted a theoretical and empirical study of the development of professional cultural identity of future managers. The experiment was conducted in two stages: in the first part the author explored the functioning of self-image of students with low self-esteem (36 people); in the second part the author conducted the formative experiment that dealt with control and experimental groups (18 people in each). 

The experimental group was trained in the framework of reflective dialogue (social reflection), and the control group was trained within the traditional framework of lectures and seminars.

The experimental results obtained gave grounds for conclusions regarding the relation between subjectively valid (personal) and objectively valid (reflexive) components of the orientation; namely, they confirmed the important role of dialogue in the development of professional reflexive competence of future professionals.