Twenty First Century Skills vs. Disciplinary Studies?

Author(s):  
Lars Vavik ◽  
Gavriel Salomon

This paper addresses the tension between a discipline-based and a skill and competences-based approach to today's curriculum. The competences-based approach emphasizes the cultivation of market-oriented skills and competencies that people acquire in the knowledge society; it is the driving force behind many educational reforms. The other, more traditional approach emphasizes the acquisition of well organized disciplinary knowledge such as history and chemistry. The differences between learning guided by pre-determined educational goals, designed to acquire disciplined knowledge, and the acquisition of daily, net-related interest-driven partly out-of-school skills learning is too large to be ignored. Each of the two approaches has its advantages and drawbacks but jointly they can constitute fruitful curricula. On the one hand, such curricula address the three main purposes of school – qualification, socialization and subjectification – while on the other they address the needs of cultivating 21st Century skills and competences. The latter comes to serve the attainment of the former.

2010 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie-Luisa Frick

Against the background of the trend of Islamizing human rights on the one hand, as well as increasing skepticism about the compatibility of Islam and human rights on the other, I intend to analyze the potential of Islamic ethics to meet the requirements for vitalizing the idea of human rights. I will argue that the compatibility of Islam and human rights cannot be determined merely on the basis of comparing the specific content of the Islamic moral code(s) with the rights stipulated in the International Bill of Rights, but by scanning (different conceptions of) Islamic ethics for the two indispensable formal prerequisites of any human rights conception: the principle of universalism (i.e., normative equality) and individualism (i.e., the individual enjoyment of rights). In contrast to many contemporary (political) attempts to reconcile Islam and human rights due to urgent (global) societal needs, this contribution is solely committed to philosophical reasoning. Its guiding questions are “What are the conditions for deriving both universalism and individualism from Islamic ethics?” and “What axiological axioms have to be faded out or reorganized hierarchically in return?”


Public Voices ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 73
Author(s):  
John R Phillips

The author, a recent graduate of the Doctor in Public Administration program, shares his thoughts about what it means to study public administration in the twenty-first century. He hopes his insights, born out of more than a forty year-long career in the field—decades of work in colleges and universities as a faculty member, dean, provost, vicepresident, and acting president, as well as his extensive experience in teaching public administration at the graduate and undergraduate levels—will help doctoral students in their academic pursuits. More specifically, he hopes that his remarks will make Ph.D. students think more deeply about the promise of their endeavors and, on the other hand, give them advance warning about perils of the process and ways to avoid them.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
CHRISTOPHER VIALS

American studies has developed excellent critiques of post-1945 imperial modes that are grounded in human rights and Enlightenment liberalism. But to fully gauge US violence in the twenty-first century, we also need to more closely consider antiliberal cultural logics. This essay traces an emergent mode of white nationalist militarism that it calls Identitarian war. It consists, on the one hand, of a formal ideology informed by Identitarian ethno-pluralism and Carl Schmitt, and, on the other, an openly violent white male “structure of feeling” embodied by the film and graphic novel 300, a key source text for the transatlantic far right.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (24) ◽  
pp. 10366
Author(s):  
Juan Carlos González-Salamanca ◽  
Olga Lucía Agudelo ◽  
Jesús Salinas

Skills needed to be successful in the world have changed, and there is a gap between those learned at school and those required to function at work and in society. A broader range of skills is required to learn, communicate, collaborate, and solve problems in digital environments. Twenty-first century skills have been identified by UNESCO, OECD, and others as competences required for a sustainable future of the knowledge society. The aim was to learn the design principles involved in the incorporation of these skills into the curriculum, find out possible ways to teach and assess them, and examine how this process could be personalized using Information and Communications Technology (ICT). A literature review was carried out through a qualitative metasynthesis, which identified 43 studies that met the inclusion criteria. From the in-depth analysis, it can be seen that although the incorporation of 21st century skills into the curriculum, teaching methodologies, and the use of ICT are all recurrent themes, there is still a need for further research into the design and implementation of new instruments for assessment and the ways in which the teaching–learning process can be personalized.


1970 ◽  
Vol 41 (116) ◽  
pp. 33-48
Author(s):  
Dennis Meyhoff Brink

DANTE’S LITERARY ATMOSPHEROLOGY | The article argues that recent theories on affect and atmosphere by, for instance, Teresa Brennan, Lauren Berlant, and Peter Sloterdijk, can enter into an extraordinarily fruitful interchange with Dante’s Divine Comedy. On the one hand, these theories can direct our attention to the hitherto overlooked atmospheric phenomena that occur ubiquitously in Dante’s Comedy and provide us with concepts that render them legible as products of human emissions. On the other hand, the numerous descriptions of different atmospheres in Dante’s Comedy can contribute to overcoming the lack of linguistic specifications and distinctions which – according to theorists such as Brian Massumi and Peter Sloterdijk – characterizes today’s Western understanding of affective atmospheres and impedes its ongoing theorization. Based on readings of a selected number of atmospheres in Dante’s Comedy, the article argues that the Comedy not only anticipated insights that were not articulated theoretically until the twentieth and twenty-first century, butalso makes up an exceptional encyclopedia of affective atmospheres that have not yet been examined, neither by Dante researchers, nor by theorists of affects and atmospheres. Therefore, both camps have much to learn from Dante’s literary atmospherology, which the article aims to make explicit.


2012 ◽  
Vol 40 (114) ◽  
pp. 143-158
Author(s):  
Tarja-Lisa Hypén

THE BRAND OF THE CELEBRITY AUTHOR IN FINLAND | In the 21st century, the celebrity author has begun to interest researchers not only as a marketing phenomenon, but also as the literary institution’s own phenomenon. In my article, I explore the relationship of the celebrity author to the so-called acclaimed authors of modern times. In Anglo-American research, the celebrity author and the bestselling author are distinguished as separate author types, but in the case of Finnish Jari Tervo, these types combine. For almost 20 years, Jari Tervo has been amongboth the most sold and the most visible celebrity authors in his home country. I examine how the publicity and brand of the Finnish celebrity author are formed. I consider how the brand affects the author’s works on the one hand, and the reception of the works on the other. I point out the limiting effects of the brand, but I also examine how, in combining the high and the low, it affords mobility in the literary fields while it also offers an opportunity to influence society.


2017 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-130
Author(s):  
SHINJINI DAS

AbstractThis article explores the locally specific (re)construction of a biblical figure, the Apostle St Paul, in India, to unravel the entanglement of religion with British imperial ideology on the one hand, and to understand the dynamics of colonial conversion on the other. Over the nineteenth century, evangelical pamphlets and periodicals heralded St Paul as the ideal missionary, who championed conversion to Christianity but within an imperial context: that of the first-century Roman Mediterranean. Through an examination of missionary discourses, along with a study of Indian (Hindu and Islamic) intellectual engagement with Christianity including Bengali convert narratives, this article studies St Paul as a reference point for understanding the contours of ‘vernacular Christianity’ in nineteenth-century India. Drawing upon colonial Christian publications mainly from Bengal, the article focuses on the multiple reconfigurations of Paul: as a crucial mascot of Anglican Protestantism, as a justification of British imperialism, as an ideological resource for anti-imperial sentiments, and as a theological inspiration for Hindu reform and revivalist organization.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Freytag

This work undertakes a systematic reconstruction of the debates that took place over the course of several decades up to the beginning of the 21st century between Derrida on the one hand and Searle and Habermas on the other. It shows that the linguistic theories and the theories of communicative understanding developed by Searle and Habermas are based on inferences from the contingent individual case to the general. Searle draws ontological, Habermas anthropo-political conclusions, both with essentially naturalistic signatures. Derrida, on the other hand, raises epistemological objections and consequently develops a metaphysics of free subjects for whom conversation cannot necessarlily be presumed. The explicit dedication to ethics in Derrida's late work is due to his insight that the possibility of language and understanding is due to silence. Derrida's lasting merit lies in enriching the philosophy of language with a secretology. This study has been awarded the Kant Prize of the Institute of Philosophy of the University of Bonn and the "Prix de la République Française", awarded by the French Embassy and the University of Bonn.


Author(s):  
Robert Wuthnow

This chapter discusses Texas politics and religion in the twenty-first century. Republicans could count on winning in nearly any national election and in an increasing number of local elections. The contests were less between Republicans and Democrats than between moderate and conservative Republicans. The state's largest Protestant denomination was still Southern Baptist, but its members remained divided between moderates and conservatives, and local autonomy increasingly meant pastors of mega-sized congregations influencing both the denomination and local communities. Denominational identities were less important than informal alliances among the leaders of conservative evangelical congregations who regarded themselves as the true adherents of biblical doctrine, on the one hand, and similar networks among progressive faith communities that emphasized inclusivity, on the other hand.


2021 ◽  
pp. 35-64
Author(s):  
Jennie Germann Molz

This chapter explores why worldschoolers take their children out of formal schooling and educate them while traveling. On the one hand, parents are motivated by the shortcomings of institutional education, arguing that schools quash creativity, pathologize children’s embodied movements, for example with diagnoses of ADD/ADHD, and fail to equip them with twenty-first century skills. On the other hand, parents are propelled by a belief that travel, which sparks children’s curiosity, celebrates their mobility, and prepares them for the future, is a better way to learn. The chapter situates worldschooling within a longer historical trajectory of public education and educational travel and traces its connections to other alternative education movements such as homeschooling and unschooling. It documents a tendency among worldschoolers to adopt an unschooling approach to children’s learning, which means parents allow children to naturally absorb lessons from the world around them rather than administering a structured curriculum. The chapter argues that unschooling merges easily not only with the logistics of travel, but also with parents’ philosophies about selfhood and individual freedom. We see that parents approach their children’s education as a choice, one that contributes to the broader lifestyle project they are pursuing.


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