Moving beyond ’21st century skills’
In responding to the radical change in working life that are currently under way, we need to tread a careful path that provides students with the opportunity to develop skills for access to new forms of work through learning the new language of work. But at the same time, our role as teachers is not simply to be technocrats. It is not our job to produce docile, compliant workers. Students need also to develop the capacity to speak up, to negotiate, and to be able to engage critically with the conditions of their working lives.
The above was written 10 years ago in a book entitled Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the ideas contained in the quotation; in fact, they form the bedrock of what some have been pushing as ’21st century skills’.
But it’s time to change the record that’s stuck on repeat.
It’s 2010. The idea of the ‘digital native’ turned out to be a myth; it’s dawning on us that even the idea of a ‘digital literacy’ is too ambiguous to be of much use. We’re in a post-Second Life brave new world.
So what can we do?
Move on. Sounds easy in theory, but what about in practice? Here’s 5 suggestions, which should ideally be undertaken sequentially:
- Debate the purpose of education. Just what exactly are we trying to achieve?
- Make explicit core competencies. The Norwegian model looks interesting.
- Invest in design. Never mind ‘functional specifications’, focus on reducing needless friction – in everything from timetabling to technology.
- Promote flexibility. It’s the watchword of our era. Let’s divorce schools from their daycare/babysitting role.
- Recognise context. What works for one educational instution can’t be replicated exactly elsewhere.
It’s not good talking about ’21st century education’. We’re 10 years into it. :-p
Hi Doug, I agree that we need to re-conceptualise 21st Century learning and as part of the Learner-Generated Contexts Research Group we believe in the importance of Context; see Rose Luckins Redesigning Learning Contexts for a fuller discussion;
http://www.psypress.com/redesigning-learning-contexts-9780415554428
We also believe in co-creation and in learning from new technology affordances to reconceptualise pedagogy; we call it the Open Context Model of Learning. Blogging on this at The Heutagogic Archives;
http://heutagogicarchive.wordpress.com/about/
Original collaborative wiki version here;
http://learnergeneratedcontexts.pbworks.com/JIME+paper
Happy to discuss, working with TLRP-TEL.
fred garnett
Thanks for the links, Fred! 🙂
I’ve most certainly heard enough of courses and proposals to develop 21st century learning skills. It is now the equivalent of welcoming the world to 90’s education in the year 2000.
Let’s talk about andragogy. That’s moving on.
“Andragogy consists of learning strategies focused on adults. It is often interpreted as the process of engaging adult learners with the structure of learning experience.”
I’m not sure how focusing on adults helps students?
Only just spotted this after logging into Disqus. We’ve had this discussion before – I see the definition and understanding of andragogy as having developed and changed in recent years. It was originally as you have identified, but now it is about the art and science of learning, providing students with the tools to enable them to develop independent learning skills to support life-long learning. This does still fit with your above definition in terms of providing students with ‘adult’ learning skills but it isn’t about focusing on adults or students – it is about using strategies to support independent, self-directed and supported learning.