SKILL UP
Skill Up: A Presentation at The December Meeting of JCI Ibadan held at Functions Hall, Premier Hotel, Nikola hills, Ibadan, Oyo State, Nigeria.
Sunday 5th December, 2021
by Oladayo Ogunbowale
S. A. Communications to Oyo State Governor
PREAMBLE
Life Nuggets:
“Decide to take responsibility for your life. Choose to work on your self, Skillup.”
“Don’t just pursue destiny, rather position for it. Destiny (fulfilment) is location sensitive.”
“Where you stand per time, determines what you see and who sees you.”
“Most visions are limited in scale and finesse by just the location of the individual.”
SKILL UP
According to IGI Global, 21st Century Skills can be defined thus;
1. A set of skills that students need to develop in order to succeed in the 21st century. Learn more in: Chemistry Learning Through Designing Digital Games.
2. Fundamental abilities that empower one to succeed in today’s world. Learn more in: Guidance and Counselling Through the Teaching of Life Orientation.
3. Skills that have been newly recognized as pertinent to navigation of and communication within the 21st century, such as communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity.
The Harvard Graduate School of Education identifies three broad domains of competence: Cognitive, Intrapersonal, and Interpersonal. “We are not just talking about knowledge here” Rather, it includes strengths such as intercultural literacy, self-discipline, and flexibility in social and work domains.
The Cognitive Competencies
21st-century global citizen’s cognitive skill set includes traditional, testable basics such as math and literacy, but extends beyond that to encompass a particularly strong emphasis on the world in which we live. “Current events highlight some of the fears around otherness,” she says. The key to informed citizenship is getting to know other cultures — and valuing them.
That means being able to:
1. Communicate effectively and listen actively
2. Use evidence and assess information
3. Speak at least one language beyond one’s native tongue
4. Think critically and analyze local and global issues, challenges, and opportunities
5. Reason logically and interpret clearly
6. Become and remain digitally literate, including the ability to “weigh and judge the validity of the content that’s in front of you,”
In some ways, digital literacy is a linchpin of the other competencies. “Technology gives us humans the possibility to collaborate in ways that are unprecedented, to think and produce things no one could produce individually”
The Interpersonal Competencies
Empathy is a cornerstone 21st-century global competency. We’re all familiar with empathy between individuals: someone’s hurt, and another person deeply understands the pain. Empathy resides in the ability to consider the complexity of issues, our individual actions impacts others.
Anchored in tolerance and respect for other people, interpersonal intelligence breaks down into several overlapping skills, including:
1. Collaboration
2. Teamwork and cooperation
3. Trust
4. Leadership and responsibility
5. Assertive communication
6. Social influence
“We need to make sure that we can get along, and that we can see our differences as an opportunity, as a source of strength.” Both regionally and nationally, students need the skills to transcend the limits of fragmentation, “where people can only relate to those who they perceive to be like them.”
The Intrapersonal Competencies
A particular blend of honed personal characteristics underpins the cognitive and intrapersonal competencies. Reimers points to an ethical orientation and strong work and mind habits, including self-regulation and intellectual openness, as traits that 21st-century educators must nurture in their students.
“We need to make sure that we can get along, and that we can see our differences as an opportunity, as a source of strength.”
The world is less predictable than it used to be: “People know that half of the jobs that are going to be around 10 years from now have not been invented,” Reimers says. That means teaching young people in such a way that makes them flexible and adaptable. It means enabling them to think of themselves as creators and inventors who feel comfortable taking the initiative and persevering — the skills necessary for starting one’s own business, for example.
Instilling in students the value of thinking beyond the short term will give them the best chance to tackle some of the world’s most daunting challenges, including climate change. For example, educators in Singapore were challenged to imagine their country not five, 10, or 15 years down the road, but 30 years in the future. Encouraging students to think on that kind of a time scale helps them to grasp the reverberations of their actions and decisions.
Values, Attitudes
In Teaching and Learning. It has been established that curriculum frameworks, seeking to understand how values and attitudes unique to each country and region, inform policy goals and ultimately shape students’ learning opportunities and eventual world view.