Let’s Embrace the World with the ‘Four Cs’: Communication, Critical Thinking, Collaboration, and Creativity (original) (raw)
Related papers
Barnett (1997) argues that the university has lost its way, but that the world needs the university more than before but for different reasons. He says that the university must clarify a new role in the world and in society, and find a new vocabulary, and a new sense of purpose. The world including the university is faced with what Barnett calls supercomplexity where human frames of understanding, action, and identity are continually changing and being challenged. In this new supercomplex world, the university, Barnett maintains, must take on two roles in particular. Firstly, it needs to compound supercomplexity, thus making the world more challenging than it has seemed. The second role is to enable humans to live effectively in this chaotic world. Internally, says Barnett, the university needs to become a new kind of organization that must, whether it likes it or not, live with uncertainty (i.e. " the uncertainty principle ") and at the same time help people to live with and revel in that uncertainty. Creativity, excellence, and excellence in creativity are also uncertain in this new supercomplex world which requires new and innovative ways of framing their interpretations and development in higher education. We focus in this paper on the potential of additional L2 global language English to serve as the medium of effecting an integrated content-knowledge-cognition and language-culture-communication creatively excellent higher education. However, it is our belief and hope that such a higher learning can and should be developed in the L1 Japanese language as the primary medium of learning and communication. The employment and deployment of CLIGAL in the home L1 Japanese and the globally useful L2 English are necessary for there to be creative excellence across the Japanese higher education curriculum.
English Language Teaching, 2019
Critical thinking is one of the core objectives of talent training in higher education. Meanwhile, the cultivation of critical thinking skills in foreign language teaching has become more and more urgent, and it has also been written into the national standards for the training of foreign language talents. A good critical thinking includes both a skill dimension (Critical Thinking Skills) and a disposition dimension (Critical Thinking Dispositions). Critical Thinking Skills include interpretation, analysis, evaluation, inference, explanation and self-regulation. This study intends to explore the current situation of the critical thinking skills of undergraduates in foreign language majors (English and Japanese) in a Normal University, and then attempts to find out the similarities and differences in critical thinking skills between English majors and Japanese majors after years of study at college. The results show that a clear difference exists between English majors and Japanese m...
There are four academic skills--21st Century Skills--that are, in some combination or iteration, common to all successfully implemented, long-lasting educational reforms. 1. Communication 2. Collaboration 3. Creativity 4. Critical Thinking This report focuses on defining and describing each of those four academic skills and providing one strategy you can use, as a teacher or parent, with your students to encourage building—use of and improvement in—each of the skills. Included is a sample of student work using the strategy and a link to detailed information on other strategies that are also effective in transforming learning environments for increased engagement and understanding.