21st Century Skills: The Implementation Issue (Part 4/8: UN Agencies Are Training 21st Century Entrepreneurs: Should They Send Them To An Art Class?)

This is the third installment of a long form article based on my MSc International Development dissertation at SOAS Development Studies Department .

21st Century Skills: The Implementation Issue.

21st century skills require 21st century teaching skills.        

The encouraging consensus on what the 21st century skills should teach is not followed by a debate about how the knowledge transfer should transpire (Voogt and Pareja Roblin, 2010). Even though the how is generally known (Luna Scott, 2015a) and the main pedagogical principles apparent (McLoughlin and Lee, 2008), the list of obstacles to clear for implementing the three categories of 21st century skills into the curricula remains long. Questions of integration, learning model and spaces, teacher attitude and training, and assessment pervade. The recommended approach that cuts across these themes centers on interdisciplinarity, applied when a single discipline cannot solve an academic question (Fuchsman, 2009; Klein and Newell, 1997). Since the 1980s, interdisciplinary studies have been a part of mainstream education, initially dominating liberal academic domains and eventually spreading to science, as scientific expertise became marked by “heterogeneity, complexity, and hybridity” (Newell and Klein, 1996, p. 155). The interdisciplinary approach has been credited with freeing disciplines from dogmatism and “epistemological entrenchment” and making them relevant for the 21st century (Sriraman and Roscoe, 2016). Hence, interdisciplinarity is especially fitting for integrating 21st century skills into the existing curriculum, as these skills are deliberately “generic” (Nakakoji and Wilson, 2020).

The consensus on what the 21st century skills should teach is not
followed by a debate how the knowledge transfer should transpire.         

Most frameworks and research suggest cross-curricular integration rather than adding skills as new subjects or developing an entirely new syllabus (Hiong and Osman, 2013; Holzer et al., 2018). Corporate respondents have also noted knowledge integration across varying disciplines as a critical attribute of creativity that they seek among job candidates (Lichtenberg et al., 2007), confirming the validity of the interdisciplinary approach. Some scholars emphasize the need for interdisciplinarity to be accompanied by transdisciplinarity to complement operational integration and linkages among various subjects with total transcendence across numeracy, science, and humanistic disciplines (Choi and Pak, 2006; Liao, 2016; UNESCO, 2020b). For the sake of the discussion below, I will continue to use the word “interdisciplinarity,” assumed in its most holistic dimension and inclusive of transdisciplinary objectives.

Most frameworks and research suggest cross-curricular integration
rather than adding skills as new subjects or developing an entirely
new syllabus.        

The interdisciplinary approach intimately relates to new teaching methods, as the archaic lecture model, while still dominant (Saavedra and Opfer, 2012), proves ineffective for 21st century education. In other words, 21st century skills require 21st century teaching skills. These new practices stand radically different from what teachers are familiar with. Collective ideation, collaborative inquiry, prototyping, agile processes, human-centered design, crowdsourcing, presenting, and open-ended thinking are only but a few applications that guide the teaching practice in the new era and indicate how outdated the lecture modality is. In the context of the 2030 Agenda, just as it would be a fallacy to assume that a single solution can tackle the multidimensional character of development crises and the multilayered SDGs reality, so it would be to expect that homogeneous techniques can teach 21st century skills.

Learning environments must include not only teachers but also
intergenerational communities, partnerships, and peers.        

Both teachers and learning environments ought to be adequately equipped to deliver this new knowledge, but neither is. The new learning paradigm indicates a shift from simply building more classrooms to accommodating their flexibility (Uduku, 2015). Classrooms require dedicated tools and infrastructure (Ag?aog?lu and Demir, 2020), characterized as a mix of spatial adjustments and technological enhancements. To encourage and nurture 4C skills, learning spaces must have the ability to be rearranged easily between different configurations to allow group work and immediate interaction as a thinking pair, table group, or an entire class. Students overwhelmingly prefer such a type of classroom (Adedokun et al., 2017). What may seem like an everyday activity of “thinking out loud” requires significant spatial environment intervention, a challenge especially demanding for debilitated educational systems in developing countries where a single class may count as many as one hundred students in a limited space.

Without facilitating 21st century teaching skills and environments,
the notion of the 21st century entrepreneur will remain a myth.        

Additionally, to nurture ICT skills and digital literacies, classrooms must enable interaction with and creation of digital content on stationary computers, laptops, iPods/iPads, video games, and VR/AR headsets in the future. Reliable and fast Internet is an indispensable factor for the school of the 21st century, and yet it is estimated that globally no more than 60% of secondary schools have connectivity, with only 30% in the least developed countries (BCSD, 2020). Some argue that parts of teaching should be taken outside of school to expand and enrich environments in which learning is provided (Leadbeater, 2008). Learning environments must include not only teachers but also intergenerational communities, partnerships, and peers (Robinson, 2006), following assumptions of the interdisciplinary model rather than a standalone course interaction. The most substantial consequence of moving past the lecture modality is that the new approach eliminates room for leniency and short-circuiting in physical space, teacher training, connectivity, electricity, devices, and software provision. Without facilitating all of the above, the notion of the 21st century entrepreneur as intended by the 2030 Agenda will remain a myth.

Teaching has never been more difficult or more important.        

Teachers – quite obviously – are the most critical piece of the 21st century learning puzzle. It is indeed a puzzle, prompting some to claim that “teaching has never been more difficult or more important” (Valli et al., 2014, p. 115). A teacher’s quality matters, as better qualified educators produce higher levels of achievement among students (Akiba et al., 2007; Darling-Hammond, 2000; Heck, 2007). Teachers themselves must appreciate, understand and master relevant skills to be able to transfer the knowledge to younger generations (Voogt and Pareja Roblin, 2010), and the new learning paradigm has significant implications for their attitudes and preparation. One cannot expect to be taught communication, collaboration, and ICT by a socially distant, digitally illiterate educator. Yet teachers’ reluctance to student-centered learning had already been observed nearly three decades ago (Goodlad, 1984), and for practical reasons: while educators do not deny its advantages, aside from the infrastructure challenges outlined above, they recognize that such learning elevates student management to new levels of difficulty (Rotherham and Willingham, 2010). These attitudes might be particularly problematic in the era that moves the onus of instruction from the teacher to the student.

Only 10% of educators are estimated to have attended training
related to transferable skills.        

All 21st century skills frameworks reaffirm that the role of the teacher for implementation is crucial and the need to support and train them beyond discussion (Voogt and Pareja Roblin, 2010). Even though receiving training in the newly added elements drives a favorable perception of an expanded curriculum (Suwarma and Kumano, 2019), the frameworks offer little in the way of elaborating on the types of teacher training programmes that schools should introduce, which may be the reason why only 10% of educators are estimated to have attended training related to transferable skills (Gonza?lez-Salamanca et al., 2020). The role of more experienced teachers might have to be strengthened as they seem to show a higher appreciation for the need to teach the new skills (Wheeler Happ, 2013). Policymakers will bear the ultimate responsibility for securing financial and methodological capacity for teacher training campaigns and enabling relevant learning spaces.

Interdisciplinary teaching requires interdisciplinary assessment
methods.        

Finally, there is a question of assessment. Interdisciplinary teaching requires interdisciplinary assessment methods. On principle, educational approaches anchored in multiple interacting, sometimes overlapping, attitudes, skills, and behaviors are considered more challenging to assess than isolated subjects (Gonza?lez-Salamanca et al., 2020; Saavedra and Opfer, 2012), and their multidimensionality must be taken into account at all stages of assessment: design, scaling and interpretation (Ercikan and Oliveri, 2016). For heterogeneous competencies to be evaluated, they must be first identified, defined, and systematized into a logical system (Geisinger, 2016), the kind of taxonomy that the 21st century skills frameworks discussed earlier attempted. Once such a system is defined, an assessment task would combine multiple components relevant to the components of the catalog of skills itself (Care et al., 2016). The measurement of a multi-component task’s outcome must go beyond the pedagogue's judgment and analysis into cognitive evidence inferred from a student reporting on their thinking processes (Ercikan, 2006). Finally, assessments must regard that open-ended subjects, for instance, creativity, are often judged differently across different cultures (Lubart, 1990; Niu and Sternberg, 2001). There is a universal agreement among scholars that both research and practice of assessing 21st century skills are lacking (Ercikan and Oliveri, 2016; Gonza?lez- Salamanca et al., 2020). All 21st century skills frameworks previously described recognize solving the evaluation issue as critical, yet they provide surprisingly little guidance on measuring the outcomes of the learning components they propose (Voogt and Pareja Roblin, 2010). Until now, most evaluation methods have followed the old patterns of basic literacy testing.

Implementation of the 21st century curriculum remains a “blind spot” across 21st century skills frameworks.        

As the above arguments indicate, implementation of the 21st century curriculum remains what Voogt and Pareja Roblin (2010, p. 30) called a “blind spot” across 21st century skills frameworks. Gaps in understanding, championing, and evaluating the new knowledge are vast (Nakakoji and Wilson, 2020), and despite growing research, practical interventions do not follow (Gonza?lez-Salamanca et al., 2020). In short, the optimism of knowing what to teach in the 21st century has been trumped by the lack of guidance and actions on how to teach it.

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