Will Brehm  1:05
Katherine Anderson Levitt, and Meg Gardinier, welcome to FreshEd.

Kathryn Anderson-Levitt  1:33
Hello Will.

Meg Gardinier  1:34
Hi Will. It’s great to be here. Thanks.

Will Brehm  1:36
Thanks so much for both joining me today and congratulations on your special issue. I just want to jump right into this. Is there a clear definition of competency-based education? It’s sort of this term we hear so often in education and international development.

Meg Gardinier  1:52
I think you’ve jumped right into one of the key takeaways from our special issue, which is that, no, we really don’t see a set, clear, unitary definition that is consistent across all contexts. But one of the things that we play with in the special issue is this kind of multiple meanings, multiple interpretations and how the notion of competency-based education gets contextualized.

Will Brehm  2:19
So, what would be some of these multiple meanings? Are there a few examples that you can sort of point to?

Kathryn Anderson-Levitt  2:25
Well, in the French language literature, you’ve got volumes and volumes of educational philosophers and pedagogues writing and debating about what this means in psychological terms, and so on. So, it’s kind of tricky. Just so people know what the heck we’re talking about, the term competency often gets translated in the Anglophone world as 21st century skills. So that I can remember what I’m talking about, I usually think of it as skills plus dispositions that is, is the student learning how to do something and to be ready or willing to do it? Sometimes it’s treated as if it were the opposite of knowledge. It’s know-how plus the right attitude instead of knowledge. Although then the philosophers will point out well, you have to have certain knowledge to be able to do something, to think critically about this, or to communicate clearly about that.

Meg Gardinier  3:23
Oh, I would just also say that it depends on the location, but also in the institution that is constructing the definitions. So, like one of the most commonly quoted is, Andreas Schleicher in OECD is saying, we need to know what students know but also what they can do with that knowledge. So, it’s really about that kind of integration of both subject-matter content and knowledge but also then how it is either applied or enacted through a skill.

Will Brehm  3:55
So, in some cases, a competency could map on to sort of school subject knowledge.

Kathryn Anderson-Levitt  4:02
Yes. But that discussion has come about partly because in some countries, there’s been a lot of tension -or people imagine there’s tension- between disciplinary content knowledge and competencies on the other hand, which are sometimes referred to as transversal competencies, or interdisciplinary competencies. So, in order to try to resolve that tension, someone like Schleicher will say, well, wait a minute, wait a minute. Now we acknowledge that you need the disciplinary content knowledge but we’re saying go beyond that. What are you going to do with it in real life practical situations?

Meg Gardinier  4:37
In a professional environment, every job that I apply to says, well, our core competencies are these, or our key competency… It’s actually more core competencies that they’re looking for, and they’re very generalized but then they also can translate into very particular tasks and skills and abilities. I think when you’re trying to use that as a framework for school curriculum, you have a very particular problem at hand, which is, yeah, exactly what do you do with the knowledge that students are supposed to acquire in school if you’re just mapping what they can do with knowledge? So, there is a little bit of a tension in terms of using the language of competency in terms of school, knowledge, and curriculum. That’s a little bit about what some of the articles in the special issue have really teased at that tension.

Will Brehm  5:31
Yeah, it seems so palpable, the tension, because even just talking now, the term seems so sort of abstract, and it’s hard to actually grab on to anything and say, This is it. I can imagine being a teacher, for instance, and it’s like, you should really focus on these competencies, and it’s like, well, what is this? How does this look? I mean, I could see how it gets really messy if we can’t even begin to define it in any concrete ways.

Kathryn Anderson-Levitt  6:00
Well, the further problem is that -then Meg mentioned core competencies. So, then in order to make it a little more concrete, an organization or a country that’s promoting the competencies will try to say, well, here’s what we mean, here are the five or the 10, that students really have to have. But what is fascinating to me is that there’s no agreement on what that list is. So, I read something that Schleicher wrote quite recently and he actually listed four. And he was picking up on a list that’s been thrown around in the United States -the four C’s: communication, critical thinking, creativity, and collaboration. But OECD itself, as Meg likes to point out, came out with a different list of five or six, I forget, back in 2005. And then now in their project Education for the Future 2030, they’ve come up with a list of about 17. And it’s not the same list that the European Union published in 2006 or revised in 2018. And it’s not the same as what individual countries are adopting. So, Esther Care and her colleagues have looked at what countries are actually putting into their mission statements or their curriculum programs. And they’ve looked at about 70 countries, and out of that, the biggest agreement they got was on the concept of communication. And that was only about 30 countries out of the total. So, this is what’s striking to me, that there seems to be very broad agreement that students need to learn a new set of skills -they think it’s new anyway- and that these skills should be taught in schools. But exactly what needs to be learned seems to vary from place to place.

Will Brehm  7:58
And then it sounds like what you’re saying is that when it does get down to the specifics, it actually reflects the institution that is coming up with the list and their priorities.

Kathryn Anderson-Levitt  8:10
I think so. And certainly, the country. So, for example, in the theme issue, Drs. Deng and Peng have talked about China’s list. And in China’s list, there are competencies that overlap with the discussion that has gone on amongst US nonprofits, the four C’s and all that. But there’s also a large category of humanistic literacy, humanistic concern, aesthetic taste, and also on their list, is enjoying and excelling in learning, and cherishing life and national identity, which is interesting because sometimes global competence and focuses on these lists. So, there’s a lot of tailoring to the point that it makes you wonder why we are pushing so hard, why is the OECD pushing so hard for countries to revise their curricula to reflect these lists when we’re not quite sure what’s supposed to be on the list?

Meg Gardinier  9:10
I do want to go back to a key word, Will, that I think you mentioned, which is the notion that they sound a bit abstract. And one of the things that got me really intrigued by that idea of competencies -I just started noticing it when I was doing my dissertation, it was everywhere. The World Bank was talking about it. All the international organizations had some form of this kind of idea of learning outcomes and competency or competencia, you know, different languages but a similar notion. And I started to look back and we’ll get into this a little bit but at the beginning of late 90s and early 2000s, DeSeCo was a project of the OECD that was defining and selecting competencies. And they asked very specific questions and they brought all these experts together to discuss what competencies do we need for a successful life and a well-functioning society? So, that was the generic umbrella that got all these kinds of experts talking about, well, what do people need? And then it got changed into what do 15-year-olds need to know, and be able to do in order to have a successful life, and contribute to a successful society. And so, I think it was a kind of philosophical exploration, initially, at least from this DeSeCo project and OECD, and bringing together different disciplinary perspective to try to understand at the abstract level, what could we say unites education internationally?

Will Brehm  10:48
It sounds like that project was searching for some universals in terms of competencies. Things that all humans across time would somehow agree, but that seems to be a bit naive in a way.

Meg Gardinier  11:01
Yeah. I think Kathryn and I would both argue that the universality is very problematic to assume a universalized approach. Especially when most of the participants in the DeSeCo project were really embedded in basically a Western European context, and frameworks, and notions. And one of the things I highlight in my article is that as practitioners come to the table in these events where they’re discussing competencies and key competencies, they’re always bringing with them their lived experience, which is based in their home country context. And a lot of times these were Western Europeans. And this became very clear in a European conference, I call it the Berne Symposium, where you had people from Western and Eastern European coming together and the person who kind of compiled the results could see very clearly those who were bringing perspectives from an established democracy and those who are in these kind of so-called transition countries. They were really prioritizing different things in the learning outcomes that they envision for their students. So, it’s very much embedded in the lived experience of the experts who were trying to define and select the key competencies.

Will Brehm  12:18
You’re using the term learning outcomes. Does competencies, are they usually attached to learning outcomes? Because when I hear learning outcomes, I think of big debates in our field over what can be measured, why we’re measuring it. And so, it makes me wonder, was the idea and the push from the 1990s onwards for competencies, was it connected to a lot of the issue of outcomes and the ability to measure outcomes?

Kathryn Anderson-Levitt  12:47
Yeah. It is definitely connected, for example, from the perspective of OECD. And trying to trace the multiple strands of history behind this whole movement, one of the strands is the development of PISA. So, in the 80s, the United States and France go to OECD and say we’re having trouble with these international comparisons, you can’t compare because the curricula are different. Can you figure out a way to make comparable measures of achievement because we’ve all become obsessed about whether our students are achieving enough. So, OECD is pushed into this and eventually out of that PISA grows. And PISA is supposed to measure, as Meg said, the competencies that a 15-year-old should have no matter what curriculum he or she has been exposed to so that therefore it’s comparable. And in the process of thinking it through, partly through the DeSeCo activities that Meg was describing, OECD focuses on competencies. And although they begin by testing, literacy, and math in PISA, they always have an ambition to measure whatever really matters. And so, PISA adds from time to time -what do we call them Meg? They have special events like every now and then a special exam will be tacked on to the PISA for countries willing to participate. So, once they tested collaborativeness. If you can picture that. Once they tested, I think they’ve done problem solving -I’ve forgotten my list. They recently tested global competence, which is what Meg is particularly interested in. And it is indeed all about testing. So, if you read the OECD Education Futures 2030 planning, they always mention assessment. And they talk about the curriculum as what you intend to teach. So, what reform is going on to shape your planned learning outcomes but then what actually is taught in the classroom. Somehow, they haven’t talked about how they’re going to look at that, but they note that it’s important. And then thirdly, what did the students actually learn? From one perspective, this is very much about assessment. And for some of the reformers, it’s convenient. In our issue of the article on France’s first competency reform in 2005, Pierre Clément says, well, amazingly, on the one hand, certain progressives supported the reform when it first came out but also conservatives and people who were interested in new public management and efficient running of the state, because it told them what the learning outcomes could be and gave them targets for what ought to be assessed.

Will Brehm  15:41
So, in a sense, what you’re saying is that the idea of competency in some of its history solve this problem of measurement of the ability to measure not only within a country but across countries in some comparable way. And so, competencies, in a sense, became the solution to that problem. And then if you create a system that has these competencies, you might be able to compare and let’s put aside the problem of the ability to compare, but at least you could do it in some sort of statistical manner. So, I wonder, in terms of competencies, there must be other strands of history, as Kathryn was sort of mentioning. Did competencies ever solve other problems, besides sort of this OECD need to measure cross nationally?

Kathryn Anderson-Levitt  16:28
They’re very much cast, by a lot of people, and a lot of people promoting it, as a solution to the new knowledge economy, as they say. Which means there’s a loss of manufacturing jobs. There’s an assumption that workers didn’t have to think when they were doing manufacturing jobs. And so now they have to think. So, they have to learn. And they have to learn how to work together in teams, which they didn’t before. And they also, I mean, sometimes you see on lists of competencies, flexibility, and autonomy. Some of the analysts in France point out that yeah, that’s because they’re trying to prepare workers for the fact that they’re never going to have a permanent job anymore and they have to be contractor gig workers. So, there is that whole economic side. But Meg, you also mentioned Eastern Europe and trying to move into democracy. So, there is that third issue, which is about preparing citizens, right?

Meg Gardinier  17:25
Oh, yeah. And again, it comes down to which organization we’re talking for. Because for instance, UNESCO, World Bank, OECD have all used the language of competencies, but they don’t all again, mean the same thing or are used to -like with OECD, you really see a kind of direct link between the notion of competencies and key competencies and the PISA assessment -and all their other assessments, by the way. They have a lot of other assessments. So, they’re all measuring something. And you know, it emerged from the idea of creating indicators for outcomes that could be assessed and compared, and competencies in education were a big part of it. But I think another question that is addressed or a problem that is trying to be solved is educational planning. If you’re a state, if you’re a ministry, and you’re trying to think about what do you want to channel? You’re creating policy. You want to create, where do you want to channel your education system? You have to think about what is the desired outcome of those systems. And a big part of it is employment, especially now, as Kathryn mentioned, the 21st century knowledge economy is in everybody’s policy handbook and jobs, employability. But also, what kind of society do you envision? What kind of society do you want to create and construct? And then how do you prepare learners to engage in the activities and demands of that society? There’s also key questions, climate change, conflict issues, democratization, there’s a lot of… any kind of issue that you’re envisioning needs to be solved in the future that learners need to be prepared for engaging with those issues, then you have to think backwards from that, and think, how do we make sure that schools are preparing learners to do the things that they need to do as they contribute to our society. And that could look like citizenship. It could look like workforce development kinds of things. It could work towards internal competencies and intrinsic competencies of conflict management, or mindfulness nowadays, social emotional learning. So, it really depends on how you’re envisioning. And one of the things that always intrigued me about competencies is that you see experts envisioning the ideal learner. This notion of kind of a social imaginary, I call it. Talk about the idea of an ideal learner becomes a competent learner. And so, then that’s mapped on to, at the policy level what schools are expected to do.

Will Brehm  20:07
I could imagine having some sort of collaborative, intercultural competency might sometimes be at odds with the way in which if some nations have a national competency. Nationalism, in many ways, is often defined in its negative. By not being some other national identity. So, that seems like a big contradiction if you’re also trying to become intercultural learners and living in harmony in many ways.

Kathryn Anderson-Levitt  20:38
And that’s important, what you just said, what schools are expected to do. Because that’s a piece of this broader push is the idea that it’s not only that people need to learn these skills, dispositions, but that it is the job of schools to teach them. Which strikes me because I’m an anthropologist, my reaction is, first of all, human beings would not have survived as a species if a lot of people weren’t good communicators, critical thinkers, and problem solvers, and collaborative. So, there’s that. And then in addition, there’s an ethnographic literature showing that actually working-class people do think on the job. You know, Mike Rose’s work and Jean Lave’s work and Sylvia Scribner’s work. So, this whole assumption that there’s a deficit to begin with is interesting. And then there are a few ethnographers, like Barbara Rogoff, who will actually go into families and among Mayans in Guatemala, for example, and illustrate how children are learning from sibling caretaking, or from observing everyday life, how to be creative or to be cooperative in particular. So, the whole deficit perspective behind this is fascinating. There are just a couple of competencies that don’t fit on that list. So, one that you always see is digital literacy. Knowing how to get information, how to use computers, or cell phones, or whatever. So, that is new. Although you might want to figure out whether kids learn that on their own, and they really need school for that or not. A second one that’s relatively new from a global perspective, is clear, written communication, because the idea that everyone should learn to write and communicate through writing is relatively new in human history, right? Because it used to be reserved. Writing only appeared 5,000 years ago, and then it was reserved for just some scribes. And then maybe this other point that Meg was alluding to, which is the ability to collaborate and get along with people who are different from you, maybe is not always learned in other settings. Because you often see this on the list, right? The intercultural competency or that kind of multiculturalism. Although I mean, even as an anthropologist, you do find a few societies where they have sayings like “we marry our enemies”, so they’ve figured the system out, but not everybody does.

Meg Gardinier  23:12
And, you know, that is also a question because there’s a lot of pushback around this idea of, is there a convergence around this kind of global norms? That question has troubled me for decades, honestly. But then I also like to think of the counterintuitive, which is, okay, let’s leave this all to individual schools, or individual districts, or individual countries, you know, or individual political entities to define what students need to learn and know. And so having lived in a very different town in the US where my values were at odds with a lot of the kind of predominant values embraced by the town, and having been to those school board meetings, the idea that we would have to follow the lead of a very narrow scope of learning outcomes, that was not aligned to anything broader than the local interest also kind of troubles me quite a bit. So, I do think there is a worthwhile conversation to be had about, okay, we push back against the kind of global imposition of an overarching framework for learning outcomes from the OECD and the norms. But at the same time, if we leave this to the very localized entities, what outcomes would they prioritize, and how would that fit into the kind of tensions that we see in our societies right now?

Will Brehm  24:41
It seems like if anyone is going to define and draw lines around what competencies are, no matter what group, at a very local level or at a very international level, it’s always going to be problematic, right? I mean, it’s always potentially going to be influenced by their own biases and what they believe as we said earlier. And also, it occurs to me that there’s a limit to how we can even imagine the future, right? So, for instance, we might teach digital skills today of using cell phones. But when these kids grow up in 30 or 40 years, we have no idea what technology potentially will look like. And the digital skills, in a sense, could look totally different in 40 years, than they do today.

Kathryn Anderson-Levitt  25:25
You’re right about that but you sound just like Andreas Schleicher on that point. Because he says, that’s why we have to teach students to be prepared for futures we can’t even imagine. And we’re going to do it somehow.

Will Brehm  25:37
Yeah. But I’m not saying I guess we should do it. I’m saying it’s a weird thing to try and imagine this future when you look in the past, as Kathryn was doing earlier, there’s so many of these skills and competencies that seem to -maybe this is me going universal here. I mean, there’s some competencies that do seem so new for this global economy that some institutions are pushing right now.

Meg Gardinier  26:01
Well, I think where there’s danger and in terms of what more is needed, I think my anxiety is around social reproduction. It’s about, if we’re just envisioning what we know, and what’s based on our lived experience, but that’s such a narrow framework, and it’s coming out of the Western European kind of norms of like the autonomous learner and the self-directed learner. This was a tension that I actually saw in my research, that the envisioned learner, this autonomous, self-directed, self-aware, someone who’s detached from their social identity. It really didn’t resonate with what I was finding in my research in Albania, where you had very connected learning and embedded learning, and everybody was kind of interconnected. The teachers, the learners, the families. And it was not about autonomy. It was actually much more about kind of integration and collaboration. So, that really made me question, is this kind of norm of the autonomous learner a Western norm? Is it something that’s universal? Because it seems to be instrumentalized very universally. And it resonates with my background growing up in the United States. But it doesn’t seem to resonate with a lot of the people I’m observing. And so that was a red flag for me. That if you are prescriptive about how learners should become, what are you not allowing as a possibility? And I think that to me, is opening up those possibilities for more input and more kind of a wider set of imagination as to the possibilities for how learners learn, and what they learn, and what they’re able to do with their learning is important.

Will Brehm  27:41
It seems like this idea of competencies is quite powerful, at least in the sort of international development fields. And as was said earlier, inside many policymaking institutions, even at ministry levels. But at the same time, hearing some of the history, it’s not as if competencies have always been around in these ministries of education, in some of these international organizations. So, I just wondered, do you think as a field of education, we’ll get over the idea of competencies? Is there something else that we could sort of attach ourselves to?

Kathryn Anderson-Levitt  28:18
Probably some. I mean, like the teachers will tell you don’t worry, there’ll be a new, six reforms that are going to come down the pipe. If you think about the tension between disciplinary content and interdisciplinary competencies, another way of thinking about it is the swing of the pendulum back and forth and back and forth. So, for example, there are a few countries that seem to adopt something, at least at the ministry level, right, seem to adopt something like competencies and have then backed off. England being one of them, Sweden, as described in the theme issue, the Flemish Community in Belgium, Poland, Japan, even to some extent backed off from things that look sort of like this interdisciplinary, broad. So, that’s another possibility.

Will Brehm  29:08
Right? So, I mean, that pendulum is a good sort of analogy here because it could swing in different directions in different countries.

Meg Gardinier  29:14
I think, you see, certainly the OECD is trying to now look at transversal and trying to move in a lot of different directions with still holding on to the idea of competency but just expanding and making it more nuanced and probably trying to be a lot more inclusive. And there’s been pushback. But I do think there are other models out there. Funds of knowledge is interesting. The kind of embedded intuitive, tacit knowledge that learners bring into the classroom when you have like culturally responsive pedagogies etc. You’re tapping into something that is not really mapped to the standardized curriculum but you’re giving space for it in the learning experience, and you’re valuing it, and you’re allowing the student to direct kind of their pathway of learning. So, I do think if you get away from the standardization a little bit and allow for a broader range of how different people learn and the knowledge they bring into the classroom, then you will see new ideas about learning outcomes.

Kathryn Anderson-Levitt  30:23
I agree very much. She’s representing what, for me, would be an anthropological perspective. So, it’s the opposite of a deficit perspective. So, pay more attention to what your students already know, and know how to do, and can you build on that.

Will Brehm  30:38
It’s nice to hear these sorts of alternative perspectives. This notion of competencies, which on one hand is like an empty signifier. Who knows what it means? It can mean anything but yet at the same time, it seems to have so much power. And it’s a really fascinating concept and idea and it obviously needs a lot more studying and research going forward. But for now, I just want to say Kathryn Anderson-Levitt and Meg Gardinier, thank you so much for joining FreshEd. Really a pleasure to talk, and again congratulations on your special issue.

Want to help translate this show? Please contact info@freshedpodcast.com

Related Guest Project/Publications

Contextualising global flows of competency-based education

21st century skills in the United States: A late, partial and silent reform

Imagining globally competent learners

The in-between worlds of Albanian educational policy-makers and professionals

A comparative analysis of OECD and UNESCO global education policy documents

Mentioned

21st century skills: Meaning, usage, and value

OECD learning Compass 2030

OECD learning framework 2030

Key competences for lifelong learning in the European schools

Assessment and teaching of 21st century skills: Methods and approaches – Esther Care 

Assessment of teaching of 21st century skills: Research and applications

OECD DeSeCo Project

Learning for all – World Bank Group Education Strategy 2020

Competency-based curriculum-UNESCO

The working life of a waitress – Mike Rose

Situated learning in communities of practice – Jean Lave

Literacy in three metaphors – Sylvia Scribner

Adults and peers as agents of socialization: A highland Guatemalan profile – Barbara Rogoff  Connected learning: An agenda for research and design

Exploring the pedagogical dimensions of funds of knowledge 

Moral priority or skill priority: A comparative analysis of key competencies frameworks in China and the United States

Related Resources
Competence-based approaches as traveling reforms
The introduction in France of skills in single schooling
Assessing global competence in PISA 2018: Challenges and approaches to capturing a complex construct
A historical perspective on the OECD’s ‘humanitarian turn’
Reflections on the implementation of competence based curriculum in Tanzanian secondary schools
Evaluating competence-based vocational education in Indonesia
Competence-based vocational education and training in its cultural context sensitivity

Multimedia

What the PISA 2018 global competence test assess

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