I spend a fair amount of time reading about PK-12 education and learning environments. In this world, especially on the design side, 21st-century comes up a lot. Teachers, administrators, planners, and architects love to talk about the school of the 21st-century and 21st-century learning environments. Here’s a good example in an RFQ for an architect of a new elementary school, which asked respondents to:
Include examples of 21st Century learning environments that your team has assisted with and incorporated into a school project.
There’s a deliberate vagueness here, borne out of an assumption of shared meaning. The request above frames 21st century learning environment as a shibboleth, intended to sort out respondents into the insiders who can provide examples that match up with the school district’s fuzzy concept, and the outsiders who cannot. In reality, I would reword the above request as follows:
Include examples of 21st Century learning environments, as the concept is understood by the members of the selection committee that your team has assisted with and incorporated into a school project. If provided examples do not align with the concept (as understood by the members of the selection committee), then we will deem your response insufficient.
Now, I have no bone to pick with the practice of using these so-called shibboleths in RFQs. If a school district must shepherd projects through a notoriously difficult approvals process with local authorities, then, by all means, ask respondents to outline common roadblocks in you locality’s approvals process. Reviewers should be able to quite easily sort out sufficient responses, the insiders from the outsiders.
But a school district would be foolish to ask respondents to broadly “identify any challenges that may arise over the course of design and construction” and simply toss out any submissions that don’t spend time on the approvals process. You’re left comparing apples and, well, non-apples. If a respondent knows the relevant approvals process inside-and-out, then they’d hardly be expected to identify it as a “challenge,” right?
The term 21st-century imposes a similarly poor litmus test. Without clear and shared meaning, how can a reviewer appropriately evaluate responses?
I know that there is no shared and universal meaning, because I’ve heard more than one architect strain at defining this fuzzy idea of 21st-century learning. The idea has acquired the looseness of business buzzwords like innovation and collaboration. Sure, they sound nice, but what exactly are you trying to talk about? In my experience, 21st-century Iearning might mean anything from project-based learning classrooms to biophilia- and wellness-infused spaces. But it might also mean something far broader and more aspirational. You might substitute forward-thinking, future-oriented, state-of-the-art, next-generation, or some other term that inches us toward some dreamy, idealistic future where people have finally, once and for all, worked out the fiendishly complex problem of public education in this country.
Beyond the vagueness and uncertainty of the term, there is another, looming problem with 21st-century, which is that 21st-century denotes a period of time—and time is a moving target.
This year marks the start of the third decade of the 21st-century, which means that we’re over 20% of the way through the 21st century. And yet, as detailed above, we continue to use this adjective in its fuzzy, future-forward sense. At some point, you begin to wonder: when does 21st-century learning instead begin to reflect the learning that, y’know, is happening right now in the 21st century?
The simple solution is to just stop using this vague phrasal adjective and actually say what we mean. Rather than ask for embedded definitions, come out and say what it is you’re looking for. Another recent RFQ, rather than referencing 21st century learning, instead asks respondents to:
Highlight design strategies that incorporates educational programming that include unique or innovative elements of the design, including flexible & collaborative spaces, and project based learning environments that inspire curiosity and inquiry.
Still a bit vague, of course, but I’ll take this request any day over 21st-century anything—a phrasing, which, as the years go by, will just continue to sound sillier and sillier.
Taylor Coe 