“So, can we say ‘skills’?”
As those whose unhappy lot in life it is to have to listen to me moaning on about matters educational will know, I’m not a big fan of the term ‘skills’. Or, more precisely, I’m not a big fan about how this term is often used. I’m even less keen when it’s preceded by […]
The Knowledge ‘versus’ Skills Debate, Part 1: forgetting what we know about knowledge.
One of the many poorly-framed, point-missing ‘debates’ that regularly plague contemporary education goes something like this: ‘should education be focused primarily on teaching knowledge, or on developing students’ skills?’ Even attempts to reconcile the (apparent) ‘knowledge .v. skills’ opposition with reasonable-sounding appeals to its being ‘a bit of both’ miss the main point – namely, […]
The Knowledge ‘versus’ Skills Debate, Part 2: What about ‘transferable skills’?
In the first part of this post, I discussed the need to develop more broad and inclusive understandings of knowledge and to move away from unhelpfully simplistic and reductive notions like ‘study skills’ which, it is wrongly assumed, stand somehow outside the realm of what we call ‘knowledge’. Here, I want to interrogate more closely […]
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