Abstract:
The key competencies (or capabilities) are a potentially transformative feature of both the New Zealand and Australian national curricula. Although the two terms are often used interchangeably as synonyms, our ongoing research programme proposes that the key competencies subsume constellations of more context-specific capabilities. Students need to develop and strengthen these capabilities in purposeful ways, at and beyond school. However the way in which the key competencies have been understood and implemented in curriculum policy, in support materials, and in practice, points to tensions and challenges that may prevent them from acting as a powerful agent of curriculum change. Analysis of the practice of the teachers who contributed to one recent researcher-practitioner partnership suggested that refocusing thinking about purposes for learning could provide one critical curriculum and pedagogical change lever. All the teachers in this project had a clear, dual focus on students’ present and future capabilities. This dual focus guided the emphasis they placed on capability development and influenced the pedagogies they chose to bring that emphasis to life. A second, subsequent research project extended this work by drawing attention to the uncertainties of life in futures we cannot fully predict. What sorts of capabilities will help students to be proactive in building their futures, as opposed to simply coping (or not) with whatever may come their way? To address this question the research team began with a futures-thinking process centered on a critical analysis of selected wicked problems such as climate change, food security and globalisation. We then worked backwards from these analyses to draw out implications for the development of specific types of capabilities and their relationships to the New Zealand Curriculum’s key competencies. We next searched for examples of cutting-edge practice where capability-development in the relevant area(s) was already deliberately supported. From the specifics of these cases we drew some general conclusions about pedagogical conditions for capability development. We also drew up a very broad manifesto of our hopes for who our young people can ‘learn to be’ in a complex, rapidly changing world. This dual set of conclusions (pedagogy, learning to be) will be discussed in the presentation.