The Pedagogy and Pleasures of Teaching a 21st‐Century Skill

Abstract

IntroductionI attended a conference several years ago on online learning and sat at a table with a faculty member who taught at what is called in the US a school for 'vocational training' (or VET in Europe and the UK). He was a welding instructor, taking young people who often had never held a welding iron and turning them into skilled craftsmen who were capable of entering the trade. I was impressed with his knowledge of pedagogy -although it was instinctual, he told me -as he described how he modelled techniques for students, used online simulations, provided opportunities for practice, and had a feeling for the kind of feedback each student needed. He told me that he and his fellow instructors applied a 'rubric' of sorts for grading, i.e. they had standards they used to assess whether or not the student had mastered both the fundamental and more complex skills of the craft. Because a mistake could be injurious, if not deadly, to the students and the people who drove over the bridges or worked in the buildings they built, instructors carefully developed students' expertise, scaffolding their learning and ensuring that they moved to the next more difficult skill only after simpler ones had been thoroughly mastered.While the welding instructor teaches a 19th-or 20th-century skill 1 , I teach professional communication, a purportedly '21st-century skill'. I write 'purportedly' because it could easily be argued that Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, and St. Augustine advocated for the study of communication (Bertelsen & Goodboy, 2009) and rhetoric was one of the three pillars of the trivium. Still, included on the many lists that have attempted to define 'transferable skills', 'key competences', 'next generation learning,' or whatever umbrella term is used, communication inevitability appears often at the top. 2 Yet, with all that has been written about the subject in Europe, the US, the UK, and elsewhere, surprisingly little has been done to deeply examine how these skills can be learned in a university setting. This may stem, in part, from the conviction, deeply held in some quarters of the academy that, while occupations like welding can be taught, a competency like communicate cannot. Some people are born good communicators and some are not, it is argued, and for the unfortunate ones who do not have innate talent, nothing much can be done to improve their lot (a similar belief is held about teaching, by the way). But 30 years in the classroom teaching professional communication, as well as a deep reading of the research into learning and instruction, tell me that this is not the case. This is what I found so remarkable about the educational philosophy and pedagogical approach of the welding instructor: how he teaches strongly parallels my experience in fostering a more abstract, but still definable skill. What makes the two pedagogical approaches similar can be unpacked and viewed closely to reveal best practices about how we can help students to gain the 'skills' we would like them to master-

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