It is time to stop our education watches and reflect upon one question: How much have we developed ourselves as species, or have we? We have initiated three industrial revolutions since the late 1700s and started the fourth, reaching a stage when an enormous array of our daily tasks can be accomplished not only by the press of a button, but also by a swipe on a touch screen, to the extent that during the pandemic lock downs, we could manage almost every need, errand, or meeting through the screens of our smart phones and laptops.
However, we, on an individual scale, are still using gasoline for cars and releasing toxic vehicle emissions, hearing about teenager girls falling to early marriage in underdeveloped countries, witnessing that females still earning lower salaries than males, receiving fake news messages on social media, and striving to see cleaner surroundings. On an organizational statistical scale, the Sustainable Development Goals SDGs reports state that food insecurity rose from 23.2 % in 2014 to 26.4 % in 2018, illness and death from diseases will still spike, gender equality is yet far to reach as women represent 25% in national parliaments and 36% in local government (2020), development aids were forced by the global recession to squeeze from $420 billion to 271$ billion, 789 million people around the world lack electricity (2018), the number of people fleeing war, persecution, and conflict exceeded 79.5 million (2019), and much more. All that was marked before the pandemic, making conditions even worse, now that health, economy, and general well-being are at unprecedented risk due to the coronavirus.
This is not meant to stir fear or cause hopelessness. On the contrary, this must stir in us all a propensity to comprehend humanity and its intricacies truly and explicitly, so that we can stand up on our feet again, ready to walk a new, more conscious path.
Since we have stepped into the 21st century, we have been cognizant of the need to change old paradigms and were inclined to move at a more rapid pace, working our way through with some terms, such as 21st century skills, critical thinking, creativity, innovations, and digitization becoming almost the dominant term.
COVID-19 accelerated all that, and now IT providers have been entrenched in digital marathons to stand out and reach more.
However, the Debris?
Organizations and individuals have been speaking about 21st century skills and learning to make the world a better, more sustainable place, and reduce, if not close gaps, in a multitude of areas. Why is it still not happening, or why is it happening at a very slow pace?
1. Division of disciplines: Education still divides knowledge into subjects, separating educators and learners from real and deep learning. This makes it difficult to conceptualize knowledge effectively and instead, spend years and years digesting the same one-size-fits-all knowledge. Integrating has only recently started to draw attention, and it is still not being applied in most schools around the world, that are still handling the material in a shallow manner.
2. Socioeconomic conditions: Up till this day in this 21st century, there are lots of communities still suffering from hunger, poverty, inequality, lack of medical care, wars, and many others, making education not only ineffective and disrupted, but in some cases inaccessible.
3. Standardized testing mandates: The structure of the world relies on educating for degrees, the admission tickets to the workplace. With much emphasis on studying to meet standards, excel in standardized tests and earn the highest GPA, learners are missing precious opportunities to play at the beginning of their education journey, to explore their surroundings during their mid years, and to express themselves during the last years as they become so entrenched in preparing themselves to jump into the rat race.
4. Misuse of Technology: When technology started, it was meant to assist in military and defense systems ARPA, but later it evolved to all fields, Advanced Research Projects Agency Networks ARPANET, and World Wide Web. The development of computers assisted in medical development and informational evolution through creating the super interrelated networks that we know today. While acknowledging its significance in education, the education world is misinterpreting its role as a medium of communicating information, and not information or content itself. It is even used for cyber attacks and cyber theft.
5. Biases and fallacies: Amid this influx of information and digital platforms, humankind has been the subject of either receiving or spreading false information, and sometimes both. Education has only started to focus on distinguishing between fact and opinions, and only few families give their children the opportunity to reflect upon themselves and the world, and sometimes speak out their opinions, preferences, and life plans.
6. Misinterpretation of Life Purpose: Society programs into stereotypes and most people fall into this trap of seeing the tip of the iceberg. Thus, they fail to tap into talents, potential, and inner beauty, wasting decades of their lifetimes, nourishing traumas and creating more karmic memories.
Stemming out from my teacher and director 20-year experience, culminating in O.R.B.I.T.S. Development Code, I illustrate 21st century learning in the attached figure, with percentages to represent the attention that must be given to each: Cognitive Rigor, technology, social emotional rigor, and global citizenship. All have equal importance because at this stage when technology, AI and education 4.0 arise, there must be a sense of balance, based on a deep sense of individual and global consciousness. This consciousness is intricately connected to nature and our inner voices. After all, education must embrace diversity, equity, and self-awareness, without which no evolution of mankind can be valid!
Cognitive rigor is a simple term to describe a quite complex process of exploring the breadth and the width of pedagogical practices. It unpacks the cognition or skills demonstrated with the scopes in which these skills are communicated and used for deeper understanding and open-ended creativity. The best way to explain cognitive rigor is to consider Bloom’s taxonomy and Webb’s Depth-of-Knowledge, harmoniously combined. Throughout this combination, educators can steer, monitor, and assess learning that builds up concepts and integrates domains, so that learners can be ready with deep, interrelated capabilities for higher levels of learning and the future demands of the workplace.
Technology is the medium of communication and delivery of our thoughts, services, teaching and learning, and more. Starting with the World Wide Web discovery, emails, smart phones, and digital applications, we are communicating 24/7 with the world. Rallying together towards more digitization, organizations and individuals have been exponentially adding more supply and demand and COVID-19 consolidated that in unprecedented ways. The pandemic has affirmed the need to have technology as Plan B for lockdowns and school closures, and considering that pandemics and increment conditions might necessitate closures in the future, technology will be more sidelined by contingency plans, and even become a partial norm. Therefore, 21st century learning cannot exist without technology, and consequently, technology will even be evolving.
Social-emotional rigor is the capability to manage all types of social and emotional situations, including the difficult ones. It is a facet of human development and growth within a society, in which challenges are inevitable and disappointments are unavoidable. Few models of social-emotional learning (SEL) were designed to cement an additional facet to academic learning. The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) states in its meta-analysis that “A key challenge for 21st -century schools involves serving culturally diverse students with varied abilities and motivations for learning”. Social-emotional skills are still related to cognition, but having them separate in this O.R.B.I.T.S.-based model is to emphasize the need to pay attention to them, instead of considering them sub skills, much behind and less significant than academic skills and tests. Behaviors can be predictors of social outcomes and even academic performance. That is why when monitored and nurtured, learners will surely grow into healthy community members.
Global citizenship is a necessity as the world has become a “global village”, in which there is not only the need for global communication, but also global understanding and consciousness. We cannot remain isolated any longer. It is our duty to open our minds and hearts to our fellow humans and our mother Earth, acknowledging that no real progress, protection, and sustainability can be reached through isolation, discrimination, harm, and ignorance. Global citizenship means taking accountability for our globe and communities and embracing diversity, freedom of expression, and equality. Parallel to this is Media and Information Literacy MIL, which is central to a world almost dominated by social media and fake news and information.
21st century learning is not technology, and it is not critical thinking skills and problem-solving. It is a bundle of all the above, and unless we sincerely understand that, our 21st century will remain inadequate to fulfill the needs and aspirations of our future generations and our beautiful planet.
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