21st Century Literacies and Change

The Audacity to Change

Educators can be forgiven if they respond wearily to each new reform proposal. For several decades, urgent calls for fundamental change have swept across American schools. From “Back to the Basics” to “Quality Management” to “Standards-Based Reform” to “Adequate Yearly Progress”, the stream of labels, formulas, and tactics used to leverage change at all levels of education has been unrelenting. But is change occurring? Are American schools preparing students to succeed in a global knowledge economy?

Breakthrough changes are helping students learn in exciting new ways in local or institution-specific pockets—frequently in spite of well-intentioned efforts to “drive” systemic change. The 21st Century Literacies Impact Conference will give educators, business, technology, and policy leaders a chance to look across successful learning innovations and develop collaborative approaches to “scaling up” approaches that are helping students hone 21st century learning skills in disparate local settings. Conference participants will be challenged to go beyond “best practices” and begin planning how we can creatively harness the institutional strengths of associations, foundations, socially-responsible corporations, and district, state, and national level education agencies to help enriched teaching and learning approaches take root in schools where they are needed most.

As the Map of Future Forces Affecting Education makes clear, sheer “will” alone won’t make education reform succeed. I believe that there is a broad consensus of educators, parents, students, community leaders, and business executives who support the vision advanced by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills. But how do we get there? Given the complexity of trends already buffeting schools, our best chance for instantiating sustainable change will come from emulating successful practices and programs that are already incubating at the grassroots level. The conference program is organized to surface innovative approaches that are already changing how teachers are initially prepared, how they learn and grow throughout their careers, and how student learning and school success is assessed. By exchanging insights both within and across our disciplinary communities, the search for replicable models and structures that support them should yield concrete results.

Of course, if our collaboration stops when the conference ends on February 2, this meeting will become just another relic in the junkyard of education reform. To maintain momentum, NCTE will be distributing conference proceedings to all conference participants, and will keep participants posted about the documentary film being produced about the conference by the students in the Academy of Integrated Humanities and New Media program at Tamalpais High School in Mill Valley, California.

The test, of course, is if we can do more than this…if the participants at the 21st Century Literacies Conference can extend their collaborations to build lasting change from the ground-up. Given the scope of the challenge, it may be audacious to reach for a goal this high. But taking the time to notice and foster the growth of successful 21st century learning initiatives holds real promise. We’ll know we’ve been successful if we can look back in a few years and see a series of interdisciplinary, public-private collaborations inspired by this conference that are changing the way teachers are prepared and sustained in their work, how student learning is supported and measured, and how in-school and out-of-school learning experiences are linked.