Abstract:

This paper is concerned with teacher education students’ views on 21st century skills. Today, western societies are becoming more and more reliant on digital technologies as digital technology is present in many aspects of everyday life (McAfee, Brynjolfsson, McAfee, 2017; Schmidt & Cohen, 2013). As technologies tend to become ubiquitous, the skills to use them and to function in a highly digitalized society become important. One way to label the skills required is 21st century skills (Ananiadou & Claro, 2009). Other ways are for instance digital literacy or digital competence (Siddiq, Gochyyev & Wilson, 2017). No matter what label, the responsibility to make sure that the future citizens have the digital skills required is a question both for schools and other actors (Dalla Vecchia, et al, 2015), but often the responsibility lies with the teachers (Morvan, 2014). Research highlight that the teachers themselves do not have the digital skills needed, or that teacher education have difficulties in providing them with the skills they need (Mørk Røkenes & Krumsvik, 2016). Sometimes it is assumed that young teachers having grown up in late part of the 20th century have the digital skills they need by default, just by being digital natives (digital natives is a view that recently is more and more contested see for instance Kirschner & De Bruyckere (2017) for a discussion on this). Research show differences in digital skills depending on demographical issues such as teacher’s age, work experience, gender, screen time and ICT education (Krumsvik et al, 2016). This paper is based on a questionnaire consisting of six open questions to student teachers (n=81). The questions concerned their views on 21st century skills they use in their everyday life, their view on 21st century skills in relation to their teacher education, their future work as teachers and for their future schools student. An early analysis show the complexities and variation in the way student teachers understand their own 21st century skills and their future school student skills. The student teachers view their own skills primarily to be related to communication, the use of social media and smartphones. They see their need to keep up with their students digital skills as important, that is they want to be good models, but they recognize this as difficult. The most mentioned skill for their future student is about being critical in relation to their use of digital technology, but 21st century skills are seen as important to be able to function in a highly digitalized society. A conclusion that can be drawn is that becoming teachers are quite aware of the complexities in including 21st century skills in their future teaching.

Keywords:

21st century skills, teacher education students, questionnaire study.