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Session Submission Summary

A Critical Analysis of Global Competence and Other 21st Century Skills: Gaps, Fissures, and Erasures within OECD PISA

Fri, April 22, 9:30 to 11:00am CDT (9:30 to 11:00am CDT), Hyatt Regency - Minneapolis, Floor: 2, Greenway D

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

One part of a constellation of educational reforms—“global doctrines” (this panel) or the Global Education Reform Movement (Sahlberg 2016)—is a push for integration of “21st century skills” into national curricula. Advocates describe 21st century skills, also known as “key competencies” or “transversal competencies,” as skills and dispositions that students need to work in the “new knowledge economy,” and/or to be good citizens. The reformers agree on the central point that school curricula need to teach more than literacy, numeracy, and other traditional disciplines. There is less agreement on exactly which competencies schools should teach, although lists often include competencies like critical thinking, problem solving, communication, collaboration and creativity (Nordin & Sundberg 2021). Even greater variation exists in the skills that nations choose to include in educational goals (Care, Anderson & Kim, 2016). Competencies have attracted considerable attention in development work, but less notice among comparative education scholars, even though they are aligned with other themes of interest, such as learner-centered instruction (Schweisfurth 2013) and, of special relevance to this panel, assessment.

However, one 21st century skill has drawn attention from comparative scholars: global competence. OECD defines it as “the capacity to examine local, global and intercultural issues, to understand and appreciate the perspectives and world views of others, to engage in open, appropriate and effective interactions with people from different cultures, and to act for collective well-being and sustainable development” (2018, 7).

Having previously launched PISA assessments of problem solving, creative problem solving, financial literacy and collaborative problem-solving, in 2018 OECD introduced a PISA assessment of global competence. Other international organizations likewise see global competence as an important skill for schools to teach. The framework of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21) included “global awareness,” and UNESCO’s Futures of Education project includes concern for “citizenship and democratic participation on local and global scales” (2021, 14).

It is difficult to challenge the idea that compulsory education everywhere should include the teaching of higher-order cognitive skills like critical thinking or social-emotional skills like global competence and intercultural understanding. Who would not want their own children to practice such skills? Nonetheless, in the spirit of critical thinking in both senses—as active inquiry and as attention to power (Burbeles & Beck, 2007)—we feel compelled to reflect on several questions:
• What might the movement to change the world’s curricula, and particularly to teach global competence, mean?
• How might it play out in local settings?
• Who benefits, and what might the costs be?

The first paper sets the frame by examining the movement for 21st century skills as a whole. Specifically, the author considers the tacit implication that people lack key competencies. Research in cognitive anthropology and cultural psychology suggests children have actually learned many of these skills outside of school, that working-class adults use many of them already on the job, and that formal assessments can miss skills that people display in everyday contexts.

Our second presenter then focuses the discussion on global competence with a deep look at the history and genealogy of the concept. Network text analysis reveals a web of US-based networked interests who have been very influential in shaping the OECD’s model of global competence, and their orientation has been to advance the interests of the United States and of corporations.

The third paper further unpack the history of global competence and its assessment in PISA by comparing OECD’s original framing text with the second framing text that replaced the original. The comparison reveals friction around the concept of culture, first presented in pluralistic perspective but in the second document narrowed into a concept of culture tied to economic development.

The fourth presenters, noting equity as a central idea in OECD’s analysis of the PISA Global Competence Assessment (OECD 2020), critically analyze PISA’s construct definition of global competence, the design of select test items, and the presentation of results. They argue that the disparities evident in PISA results, rather than simply reflecting the advantages of socio-economically privileged students, actually indicate the cultural embeddedness of global competence which, due to PISA’s definition of this construct, favors students from more privileged backgrounds, fails to acknowledge diverse forms of global learning, and thus fails to comprehensively capture what students know and can do. Examining the OECD’s limited, culture-blind approach to equity matters because PISA influences policy within and across diverse nation-states.

The final paper brings the discussion full circle by describing actual implementation of a global competence curriculum by school district actors in Washington, DC. Drawing on the concept of “cosmopolitan nationalism” and on prior research on ILSAs, the author illustrates the complex assemblage of global, national, and sub-national policy scales in which a corporatized framework for global competence comes into contact with advocacy for equitable access to globally-oriented educational initiatives.

In short, for OECD, comparative tables on tests of literacy, numeracy—and 21st century skills—are tools for moving national policies and, eventually, classroom practice and hence learning (Schleicher & Zoido, 2016; OECD 2018). But move toward what curriculum, exactly, and at what costs? The notion of 21st century skills is polysemic and interpreted differently, sometimes contradictory ways, by national ministries of education (Authors 2021). The costs, meanwhile, include further overloading the curriculum (Rockwell 2021; OECD 2020) and potentially sidetracking more pressing reforms.

Although there may nonetheless be an argument for teaching global competence in schools, again, meanings vary, and papers in this session raise concerns about the OECD’s definition of global competence as aligned with corporate economic interests. This matters, again, because the OECD has a tool to enforce its definition, the PISA assessment. Posed precariously against that definition are local educators like those described in the last paper pushing for an alternative, equity-based meaning of global competence.

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