Daily Times

It is pretty necessary for a teacher to ask himself what objectives he is intends to achieve when he is going in the classroom because he is the one who is supposed to know very well what does it means to teach.

A few of these objectives can be to develop critical thinking, communication skills and collaboration with others. This cannot be achieved unless the teachers attach with it the development of creativity, cultural awareness, autonomy of the learners and now, digital literacy in the class room. It has become even more essential in the 21st century because the hybrid mode of guidance adopted because of the Covid-19 restrictions and all the paraphernalia attached with it. Not only this, the new-normal situation demands development of life skills among our millennial learners alongside their usual syllabi objectives.

Prior to Covid-19 impact, the teacher in a humanities classroom would deliver the contents, facts, dates, formulae, information, stories and information to his students, which has become insufficient if not redundant for education and training because online available resources, like Google, Webpages, Blogs, Facebook, cell phone sources, Twitter, Wikipedia, YouTube, MP3 Players and Bing are bent upon supplanting the teacher. Now teacher’s role is more of engagement with the students and of looking into what kind of and which information students are consuming and for this purpose. Now, he needs to engage with his students in a very different way.

The teachers and professionals involved in curricular development and training must include these new realities within the content of the syllabi with a focus on teaching the life skills to the 21st young person, so that he lands in a society not as a baffled person ignorant of his path through the world for the lack of life skills. These life skills may include from fixing of a car flat tyre to buying a credit card. He should also know how he can find fastest route to his destination and to evaluate and see renting of a vehicle. The 21st Century youth need to have the skill of developing its personal image to grab the best opportunity. He must be able to differentiate between fake news and reliable news. At this moment, especially in Pakistan, we just send our learners with a certificate of course attended and passed. Except a few, mostly fail to adjust in the modern, highly sophisticated, digitally globalised world. He must also know, in my opinion, how to vote and whom to vote for and to select the right tools for his projects of life. The digital times of 21st century further require to equip the learner with the skills of blogging, podcasting, animating, recording, designing and programming, at the initial level least, especially because, a large number of young people are turning to making money through online activities. In fact, every professional now is in need of these skills to navigate his way through modern means of connectivity and presentation of his data. Besides, the learner must be equipped with skills of paraphrasing, attributing, editing, reflecting, tagging, searching, integrating, networking etc. And all this he must be able to use with a certain sense of responsibility, reliability and integrity. With this type of training included, our youth would not opt for plagiarism, Pirating and violating the copy rights.

This is in the 21st Century education system is the only way to make the learners pass through the pyramid of learning successfully which moves from bottom with remember, understand, apply, analyse, evaluate and reaches ultimately to create. In view of this pyramid of learning it becomes even more necessary to inculcate practicality, creativity and originality in the process of teaching and learning. While our students are heavily depending on internet fed information, we should come forward to teach them how to use this information. The main idea behind is to see the validity and reliability of information. The students must be taught to find who is the creator of the information and when the information was created. In this deluge of information, the students must also know the relevancy of information for his specific field and project.

As for the inside classroom instructions, the teacher needs to learn all these skills himself because their absence would not make him acceptable to the class because of their access to easy and quick information. The best way is to allow the use of electronic gadgets to be used in the class room but in a way that they are not distracted by the digital temptations of the media being used. One of the best way is to give them a conflicting situation which they may attempt to come up with a solution of the situation after they have sifted through available sources and have sufficiently debated within themselves in groups, pairs or even as role models. Afterwards, they can be tested through any type of creative activity. Unless our education system incorporates these additional skills with the regular curricula, our young generation is unprepared to compete with the rest of the world in 21st century.

The writer is a professor of English at Government Emerson University, Multan. He can be reached at zeadogar@hotmail.com and Tweets at @Profzee