21st Century Education

21^st Century Education is becoming a dominant topic of discussion among educators today, as it addresses the need for a shifting educational paradigm in order to keep pace and respond to an ever-changing global community. Alongside the mandate that every child must be given adequate resources to support individual learning, as educators we must also modify individual instruction in correspondence with the strengths and needs of every student. This includes recognizing the diversity of each student as well as the knowledge, skills, and perspectives they may already have. Perhaps most importantly, both educators and students must work collaboratively to construct a foundation that supports critical literacy so that students are able to synthesize and interpret information.  

My experiences as a fourth year undergraduate student have shown me that ‘literacy’ is not a segregated and shallow category that contains only written and/or oral communication skills, but rather it is a multifarious grouping that contains multiple forms of literacies with fluid and dynamic meanings. For example, media literacy, moral literacy, environmental literacy, financial literacy, multicultural literacy, and so on, are all considered subcategories within the evolving framework of ‘literacy’.

CC Take Back Your Health Conference (2015) [Video file] 

Retrieved from https://www.flickr.com/photos/130855607

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As we take our next steps into the year 2016, I believe there will be a resurgence of interest around health, including nutrition, and physiological, spiritual, and mental health. The New Year provides an excellent opportunity for educators to jump on the proverbial ‘health band wagon’, in order to improve and enrich our student’s understandings of health literacy. I also believe that technological literacy will continue to play a major role in the way we communicate and interact with one another. App education is a booming area of interest, and apps such as Notability, See, Touch, Learn, Kindle, and so on have proven to be useful and effective within classrooms. Apps and other technological devices also provide the function of serving as alternative and differentiated methods of instruction and assessment which may assist some students.

As I have mentioned, 21^st century education is a framework that supports and encourages student’s strengths and multiple literacies. Although 21^st century makes repeated references to the curriculum and accompanying expectations, there are underlying principles that support a holistic educational framework, that encourages learning and skills that can be transcendent beyond the classroom, and further applied within a global network. As educators it is important that we present material that is useful and relevant for our student’s today, and that we build off of their innate strengths and potentials.