2.1.1. Quality Education in the 21st Century

Jegyzet elhelyezéséhez, kérjük, lépj be.!

In our increasingly turbulent and interconnected world, education has to meet new needs to prepare students for the challenges of the 21st century. In 2015, the United Nations (UN) adopted the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), which are a call for action by all UN countries to tackle global challenges (e.g., poverty, climate change, gender inequality) by 2030. As it is widely believed that education is the most powerful weapon to challenge inequalities, the fourth goal became quality education for all. According to Goal 4, quality education must develop the skills, values and attitudes that enable citizens to lead healthy and fulfilled lives, make informed decisions, and respond to local and global challenges through education for sustainable development and global citizenship education, as well as human rights education and training in order to achieve the United Nations Education 2030 agenda (UNESCO, 2018, p. 1).

Jegyzet elhelyezéséhez, kérjük, lépj be.!

The key features of Goal 4 include (a) ensuring lifelong learning opportunities for all, (b) a renewed focus on equity, inclusion, and gender equality, (c) a renewed focus on effective learning, and (d) a new focus on the relevance of learning (UNESCO, 2016). To make learning relevant in the 21st century, on the one hand, teachers need to develop their students’ work-related, but also cognitive and transferable skills, which can be used in as many different work settings as possible, given the unpredictability of the job market; and on the other hand, teachers need to develop the knowledge, skills and attitudes required by citizens to successfully face the challenges of our modern world (UNESCO, 2016). In other words, education systems have a prime role in preparing global citizens and the workforce of the future (World Economic Forum, 2020a).

Jegyzet elhelyezéséhez, kérjük, lépj be.!

The era we live in today has also been referred to as the Fourth Industrial Revolution: this period has been marked with breakthroughs in the fields of artificial intelligence (AI), the internet of things, nanotechnology and biotechnology, and these new drivers of growth have contributed to a “massive shift in the skills” required to succeed in the 21st-century job market (World Economic Forum, 2020a, p. 5). Based on current trends, it also seems likely that children will be working in completely new job types that do not exist yet (World Economic Forum, 2020a), and people having only a basic skill set could be easily replaced in some years’ time by machines as a result of automation and artificial intelligence (RAND Corporation, 2012; World Economic Forum, 2020b). It is imperative for education systems to keep pace with these changes. According to many prominent organisations and authors (Binkley et al., 2012; Council of Europe, 2014; Partnership for 21st Century Learning, n. d, World Economic Forum, 2020a), so that students meet the demands of the changing job market, they need to be equipped with 21st-century skills.

Jegyzet elhelyezéséhez, kérjük, lépj be.!

The term 21st-century skills has become a buzzword, and different authors have attempted to draw up its components in different ways. According to the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21), they include three main types of skills:

Jegyzet elhelyezéséhez, kérjük, lépj be.!

  1. learning and innovation skills (i.e., creativity, critical thinking, communication, collaboration);
  2. information, media and technology skills (i.e., information literacy, media literacy, ICT literacy);
  3. life and career skills (i.e., flexibility and adaptability, initiative and self-direction, social and cross-cultural skills, productivity and accountability, leadership and responsibility) (Partnership for 21st Century Learning, n.d.).
 

Jegyzet elhelyezéséhez, kérjük, lépj be.!

The P21 Framework emphasises that these skills should be taught discretely in the context of the key subjects (e.g., Language Arts, World Languages, Mathematics, Science, History) and should be developed while dealing with 21st-century interdisciplinary themes (e.g., global awareness, environmental literacy, health literacy). After careful consideration, the American National Education Association deemed the framework (they developed together with Partnership for 21st Century Learning) too complex and started to only emphasise the importance of the 4Cs (creativity, critical thinking, communication, and collaboration) and have been striving to integrate them into the curriculum (National Education Association, 2012).

Jegyzet elhelyezéséhez, kérjük, lépj be.!

Another 21st-century skills framework was developed by the Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills (AT21S) international project, funded by Cisco, Intel, and Microsoft. Compared to the P21 Framework, it seems more complex, as the authors believe that each presented skill has an underpinning set of knowledge, skills, attitudes, values, and ethics. As a result, this model is named KSAVE after the initials of these dimensions. The basic model comprises the following skills:

Jegyzet elhelyezéséhez, kérjük, lépj be.!

  1. Ways of thinking: Creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving, decision-making, learning and innovation;
  2. Ways of working: Communication and collaboration;
  3. Tools for working: Information and communications technology (ICT) and information literacy;
  4. Living in the world: Citizenship, life and career, and personal and social responsibility (Griffin & Care, 2015).
 

Jegyzet elhelyezéséhez, kérjük, lépj be.!

This model shows some similarities with the P21 framework; however, it uses the word skill relatively loosely for the four above-mentioned categories. What is new, compared to the P21 model, is that here the citizenship dimension is also included, because according to Binkley et al. (2015), “people must learn to live not only in their town or country but also in the world in its entirety” (p. 54) and it is only possible if they understand all the aspects of citizenship.

Jegyzet elhelyezéséhez, kérjük, lépj be.!

The World Economic Forum (2015) also created its framework based on the analysis of relevant literature. They identified 16 key skills and grouped them into three main categories – foundational literacies, competences, and character qualities, as shown in Figure 2.1 below.
 

Jegyzet elhelyezéséhez, kérjük, lépj be.!

Figure 2.1 21st-Century Skills
 

Jegyzet elhelyezéséhez, kérjük, lépj be.!

Their proposed framework puts the 4Cs in the centre as key competencies, which seems to be sensible based on the P21 framework. What is more, they also included basic skills, such as literacy and numeracy in their list, which makes the whole framework more rounded and shifts the focus to all the skills needed in the 21st century to succeed (not only to the new ones). According to Lucas (2019), the most problematic category of this framework is character qualities: even though it contains characteristics that are arguably important, grouping grit and leadership together, two notions with very different scope, remains questionable.

Jegyzet elhelyezéséhez, kérjük, lépj be.!

The term 21st-century skills came in for a lot of criticism from researchers for being too vague (RAND Corporation, 2012; Lucas, 2019; World Economic Forum, 2015) and uncritical (Bourn, 2020b; Lucas, 2019). Moreover, as its different elements are defined loosely and inconsistently, policymakers and educators have difficulty measuring progress in them (World Economic Forum, 2015). Nevertheless, the main argument against using the term 21st-century skills is the fact that in our ever-changing, turbulent world, no one can know what skills we will need in 10-, 50- or 75-years’ time (Lucas, 2015), so applying these lists to a whole century may reflect wishful thinking. It may prove to be more expedient to think in shorter terms and concentrate on the current challenges in our world and try to address those. For instance, the World Economic Forum (2020a) outlined eight characteristics of learning content and experiences which can define quality learning in the Fourth Industrial Revolution and named it Education 4.0:

Jegyzet elhelyezéséhez, kérjük, lépj be.!

  1. Global citizenship skills
  2. Innovation and creativity skills
  3. Technology skills
  4. Interpersonal skills
  5. Personalised and self-paced learning
  6. Accessible and inclusive learning
  7. Problem-based and collaborative learning
  8. Lifelong and student-driven learning
 

Jegyzet elhelyezéséhez, kérjük, lépj be.!

The skills listed among these characteristics largely overlap with the ones in the P21 Framework and by the KSAVE framework, nevertheless, they are regrouped and given new scopes in the present list. It is worth pointing out that conversely to the previous frameworks, in this list, global citizenship is given precedence, a notion which appears in SDG Number 4 (i.e., Quality education), but which had not been included in previous frameworks either explicitly or at all. Several factors contributed to the fact that Global Citizenship Education gained momentum in the previous decades, which are discussed in the following sections.
 
Tartalomjegyzék navigate_next
Keresés a kiadványban navigate_next

A kereséshez, kérjük, lépj be!
Könyvjelzőim navigate_next
A könyvjelzők használatához
be kell jelentkezned.
Jegyzeteim navigate_next
Jegyzetek létrehozásához
be kell jelentkezned.
    Kiemeléseim navigate_next
    Mutasd a szövegben:
    Szűrés:

    Kiemelések létrehozásához
    MeRSZ+ előfizetés szükséges.
      Útmutató elindítása
      delete
      Kivonat
      fullscreenclose
      printsave