21st Century Skills

While identifying the desirable outcomes of a course of study would seem like an essential first step in the teaching/learning process, there are two trends unfolding in the literature on 'new literacy' or 21st Century skills.

1. There seems to be an acceptance that there is a finite number of specific skills which will make students eLiterate and equip them for life and work in the 21st Century.
2. Having drawn up the list of skills, there is a tendency to define, teach, and assess these skills in standardized and universalized ways.

Lankshear and Knobel argue that 'digital literacy' should instead be seen as a shorthand expression for the fluid social, cultural and personal practices that are involved in making sense of the texts that we encounter, and through the texts we create.

Graduate Attributes

As the semester winds down, we have been engaged in the task of mapping the University's graduate attributes to the major strands of study in the B.A. and B.SocSci. - a good opportunity to reflect upon just what it is, exactly, that students are learning, and how that meshes with what we think we are teaching.

Our Graduate Attributes Policy outlines how graduates from our degree program will demonstrate professionalism, community responsiveness, and scholarship. That is, they will have an approach to work and activity, to society, and to knowledge and learning, that identifies them as graduates of the University of Newcastle.

Operationalizing this policy is an ongoing process of unsuring that these domains are reflected in the objectives of individual courses, and their achievement tested through the assessment items; and of identifying the specific attributes that will developed in the major strands of study in the programs.

An agreement on these attributes has yet to be reached, but under discussion are the following:

• Problem solving – an ability to identify problems and seek solutions from a range of sources
• Communication – an ability to communicate in diverse forums and formats.
• Receptiveness – an openness to new ideas and a sensitivity to different beliefs and opinions.
• Information literacy – an ability to locate, evaluate and re-integrate information.
• Self-direction – an ability to understand, monitor and control one’s own activities.

Start with the pedagogies, not the technologies

As a lecturer in cultural studies at a regional Australian University, my teaching is based on a pedagogy that is consistent with the concerns of cultural studies.

These concerns include the notion of discourse and the nature of 'truth', the social construction of knowledge, representation and and the politics of reception, and identity, commodification, and resistance.

Henry Giroux has, for the last thirty years, been engaged in a sustained attempt to link critical pedagogy and cultural studies in a project aimed at developing a more democratic culture and a politivally aware citizenry. Douglas Kellner summarises Giroux's work, saying that in a time where new technologies, discourses, and practices are emerging almost daily, we need not simply more sophisticated ways of acquiring knowledge about our culture and the society in which we live, we need a critical pedagogy that struggles for democratization and against injustice.