An Epistemic Shift: A Literacy of Adaptivity as Critical for Twenty-First Century Learning
Many so-called twenty-first century literacies are not new; it is only that they are particularly germane to our present times. Dispositions and skills such as collaboration and media literacy are more critical now than ever, because of the degree of inte
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An Epistemic Shift: A Literacy of Adaptivity as Critical for Twenty-First Century Learning David Hung, Kenneth Y.T. Lim, and Azilawati Jamaludin
The Twenty-First Century and a Literacy of Adaptivity The co-construction of knowledge is central to the model of adaptive expertise suggested by Schwartz, Bransford and Sears (2005). The model highlighted the inadequacy of classical notions of the expert–novice relationship in contexts of dynamic goals and unpredictable constraints. The work of colleagues at the National Institute of Education (NIE) in Singapore – who have worked closely with teachers and students across a wide range of academic cohorts – has prompted our emerging realisation of the socioculturally situated irony that despite that country’s robust digital infrastructure and institutional rhetoric around a knowledge-based economy, teacher-practice and understandings about learning in schools remain arguably stolidly rooted in a functionalist paradigm of Fordist-production. This is consistent with both Leander’s (2007) sociopolitical construct of technology-in-education and Callick’s (2008) description of the education system in China, and in turn casts doubt on Baumann’s (2004) depiction of the nonpredictable ‘liquid-modern’ world as a ‘contemporary social reality’. Thus, it has been our cautionary observation that • prevailing assumptions of curriculum planning in Singapore continue to be based on instructional-systems paradigms from the twentieth century; and • notions of being able to ‘teach’ twenty-first century soft-skills and literacies are inherently flawed because they are founded on the assumptions of these anachronistic paradigms and do not adequately acknowledge the process- and relationallybased nature of such skills and literacies.
D. Hung • K.Y.T. Lim (*) • A. Jamaludin National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore e-mail: [email protected] D. Hung et al. (eds.), Adaptivity as a Transformative Disposition: For Learning in the 21st Century, Springer Education Innovation Book Series, DOI 10.1007/978-981-4560-17-7_1, © Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2014
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Such instructional-systems paradigms assume that truth can be made explicit and packaged into neat curricular units and taught as knowledge-products. While such a view of knowledge has proved workable in a stable industrial age, our present Conceptual Age (Pink, 2005) – with its dialectics between knowing and the known – behoves us to challenge these assumptions. The Conceptual Age is characterised by the construction and deconstruction of knowledge, and by more participatory and dynamic (less stable) knowledge production across multiple contexts of learning. With its emphasis on navigating the axes of efficiency and innovation, the aforementioned model of adaptive expertise strongly suggests that the efficiency-oriented assumptions underlying instructionalsystems approaches to learning, need to be tempered against the provision of opportunities for embodied expe
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