First impressions
When I first heard the latest buzzword in ELT: ’21st century
skills’, what immediately sprang to mind were those flawed visions I grew up
with (in the 1970s to the 1990s) of the impending new millennium: space
holidays, permanent bases on the moon and possibly on other planets, cities
under the sea, hovercraft or spaceships transporting us to work and school, robots
replacing teachers as well as those of computers in every home... (oh, hang on,
that’s actually happened!) and home schooling by computers... (which also seems
to be happening to some extent – with adaptive learning, online learning
platforms, LMSs and whatnot, more about all of which probably in a later post).
Then I looked into what the term meant and I found out it
was something quite different. (Being an ardent sci-fi fan, I was a bit
disappointed it had nothing to do with spaceships.)
Back in the 20th century
The reason we didn’t talk about ’20th century skills’ when I
began my learning then teaching career then was twofold: 1. we were too near
the end of the century to name anything after it, and more importantly 2. the
difference between the speed of change in the world we lived in. Our teachers’
generation and our teachers’ teachers’ generation passed on their accumulated
knowledge and life experience to a new generation, safe in the knowledge that
most of their skills are still relevant and useful for the young. Of course,
there were changes and developments, shifts in priority, but in broad terms,
the skills they could teach us, drawing on their own personal experiences, were
the skills we needed to learn.
As far as ELT was concerned, the teacher was the primary,
and in many countries, the sole source of knowledge and of learning materials
in English. Often, the teacher was one of the few people, if not the only person,
learners could communicate with at all day to day, using the foreign language
they were learning. Books, magazines, newspapers in English were difficult to
come by – and they were often expensive. (At least to us in the Eastern Bloc –
we’re talking about the 70s and 80s when we’re talking about my student years.)
Teachers were therefore the access points to English as well as the primary
role models of non-native language users.
21st century developments
Not so in the past decade or so. With the spread of the
internet, access to materials in English is unlimited – written, audio as well
as visual materials fill the web and spill over into the real world. Knowledge
and learning experiences can now be shared among learners around the globe 24
hours a day, thanks to social networks. A lot of this flood of English is free
of charge, too. ... and a lot of it is rubbish. What has changed quite
significantly therefore is that learners no longer really need a provider of
English, but they need a guide. They need someone to show them how to locate
relevant information, filter what is irrelevant or unreliable and to use
critical skills to judge the value of whatever is left to use.
The role of teachers is changing, and publishers all seem to
be queueing up to ride on the ’21st century skills’ bandwagon. A lot of this
activity brings benefits to the learning experience: there is more variety in
content and media, more integration of language and other disciplines than ever
before. Judging from some of the most recent frontlist publications, there is
also a renewed enthusiasm for original (or neatly updated) teaching concepts
after a couple of decades of ’if it works, don’t fix it’ formulaic curricula –
especially in schoolbooks publishing.
Find out more about 21st century skills
Steve Taylore-Knowles provides a rationale
for why ’21st century skills’ (or ’life skills’ in their preferred corporate
parlance) are vital (Why should we teach Life Skills?)
on the Macmillan Life Skills website, while Robert Balaguer Prestes gives an informative
overview of how learners fit into this whole paradigm (21st century students and skills)
on the Pearson 21st century learning website, where there are also a number of
related articles by Nick Dawson which I’ve found quite useful. OUP meanwhile runs workshops on the subject, some of which I recently delivered myself in Indonesia and Serbia.
What educators and policy-makers need to bear in mind about
21st century skills is that it is originally a business initiative, a sort of
corporate think-tank project (The Partnership for 21st Century Skills)
to groom the next generation of workers especially skilled at being adaptable. It
was probably quickly realised by the stakeholders that if the scheme is to
work, introducing these flexibility skills must obviously start much earlier on
– when school education begins. They drew up a helpful diagram to illustrate
how this all fits together (image taken
from www.21stcenturyskills.org).
What's in it for us?
But what exactly is new about teaching our students the
value of Critical thinking, Communication, Collaboration or Creativity (the
famous 4Cs of ’21st century skills’)? Well, as far as I can tell, nothing
really. It is the application of these skills to how language is used as the
medium of interaction rather than as the subject of analytical study, to how
classroom skills become transferable to life skills, to how ICT skills become
integrated with language skills, that makes 21st century skills meaningful to
education.
In my opinion, the idea is certainly worth exploring further
– especially how it could be applied to benefit language learners. But the
concept of ’21st century skills’ is not without its sceptics. CUP organised a
debate in 2013 (21st century skills - a 21st century problem?)
where some of the speakers questioning whether there was anything novel about
these skills at all before exploring its implications for assessment
especially. One of the most vocal opponents is Diane Ravitch who outlined her
criticism in his article on the subject subtitled An Old Familiar Song (21st century skills - an old familiar song).
Ravitch went on to dedicate her blog (Diane Ravitch's blog) to the subject, where she even proposed the
promotion of ’19th century skills’.
Like it or not, though, 21st century skills are here to stay.
And if you’re a teacher, you’ll no doubt find a meaningful role of it all in
your classroom – as you always do with each passing trend in the profession.
