robyn jay

I’d been pondering the skills and capabilities and attributes I think the contemporary education system needs to support in young people today when I came across the following video thanks to a post from Rod Lucier in his The Clever Sheep blog. I first saw it a couple of years ago but it was good to revisit ….

So what do young people need to effectively operate, and be the change agents, in a world that will see substantial change in their lifetimes ….

In his post – Empathy: An Overlooked 21st Century Skill – Christopher D. Sessums reflects on the same.

He refers to the work of Henry Jenkins et al who in 2006 list …
•    Play — the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving
•    Performance — the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery
•    Simulation — the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes
•    Appropriation — the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content
•    Multitasking — the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details.
•    Distributed Cognition — the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities
•    Collective Intelligence — the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal
•    Judgment — the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources
•    Transmedia Navigation — the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities
•    Networking — the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information
•    Negotiation — the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms.

and to Tony Wagner’s seven survival skills:
•    Critical thinking and problem solving
•    Collaboration and leading by influence
•    Agility and adaptability
•    Initiative and entrepreneurial-ism
•    Effective oral and written communication
•    Accessing and analyzing information
•    Curiosity and imagination

To these Christopher himself adds empathy.

So, what’s missing?
Here’s my own additions. I’d like to hear what you would add….

• creativity and lateral thinking
• compassion and civility
• perseverance and persistence
• the ability to critique and validate
• the ability to filter and synthesize large amounts of information
• cultural awareness
• resilience
• balance
• risk-taking
• the ability to self-promote and manage a virtual identity/ presence and content

The big question is of course, how well does the current education system acknowledge and focus on these?