Download Moral competence in a cultural context

What does it mean to be a
‘competent’ person in the
21st century?
Helen Haste
Harvard Graduate School of Education
University of Bath, UK
Competence
•
•
•
•
Adaptation
Adaptive and flexible reflection
Not skills, though it may involve skills
Adaptation to change which may
include maintenance of continuity
‘Being competent’ means:
• Being able to resource appropriate tools,
critically
• Being able to manage conflict productively
• Being able to adapt to new situations
reflectively
• Being able to be an agent, responsibly.
• Problem-solver
• Tool-user
•Knowledge based
•Praxis based
•Interaction WITH THE ENVIRONMENT
- IN DIALOGUE
•Interaction WITH OTHER PEOPLE
IN DIALOGUE.
How change happens
• More of the same
• Quantity into quality
• The knight’s move
5 Competences
•
•
•
•
•
Managing ambiguity and uncertainty
Agency and responsibility
Finding and maintaining community
Managing emotion
Technological change
Managing ambiguity and
uncertainty
•
•
•
•
•
Perspective taking
Managing ‘multiple selves’
Multi-tasking on moral issues
Managing ambiguity and conflict
Appraising cultural variation
Agency and responsibility
• Efficacy and agency
• Being able to take responsibility
• Recognising the personal obligation to
take responsibility
• Drawing on appropriate cultural
narratives defining one’s responsibility
Finding and maintaining
community
• Perspective-taking within the community
• Perspective-taking outside the
community, vis a vis community
interests
• Taking responsibility for connecting and
coordinating
• Defining, and resisting, boundaries of
community
• [In Putnam’s terms] bonding and
bridging
Managing emotion
In Western thought, reflected in much
psychological research, there are four
main ‘theories’ of emotion.
Each ‘explains’ the relationship between
reason and emotion in different ways
Only one is a really ‘competent’ way of
dealing with emotion
* Emotion DISORGANISES reason; it
distorts or corrupts pure logic
* Emotion is ORGANISING in the sense
that it provides the energy, or motive, for
decisions reached through reason to be
acted upon. But reason and emotion are
still separate and reason is more
trustworthy than emotion
Emotion and reason are separate,
but emotion is more trustworthy
especially about human
relationships:
“You should listen to your heart
rather than your head”
“The heart has its reasons of which
reason knows nothing.”
Blaise Pascal
* The neuroscientist Antonio
Damasio has shown that braindamaged people who have lost their
emotional function, and therefore are
pure ‘reasoners’ (like Mr Spock), are
incapable of making life decisions.
Therefore, BOTH reason AND
emotion are essential to problemsolving and decision-making; they
are NOT SEPARATE
• Finding ways to reflect productively on
one’s own emotions and those of others
• Self-aware integration of emotion and
reason without denying either
• Recognising a ‘moral’ emotion as
distinct from a self-defending emotion
• Distinguishing immediate responses eg disgust - from culturally conditioned
responses [example of homosexuality]
Managing technological
change and changing social
practices
• Adapting to new social practices
• New forms of communication and their
implications:
• Opportunities for expanding social
networks
• Democratising agency and
responsibility, including in the civic
domain
Evidence of new social
practices
• Civic engagement; Obama campaign,
WTO, Iraq War and other
demonstrations
• High levels of skills, especially
organisational and leadership, in
complex gaming
Implications for traditional
models of education
• Bottom-up rather than top-down
• Knowledge accessed and modified by
the agent
• Praxis is virtual as well as real and the
two may combine
• Individual assessment and the losing
battle with plagiarism
What is needed to capitalise on this
for education?
• Rethinking the role of the teacher
• Enhancing critical reflection and
selection in the context of bottom-up
access to information
• Encouragement of responsible use of
innovative resources
Capitalising on…..
• Collaborative and interactive working,
and finding ways to evaluate it
• Opportunities for agency, leadership
and organising skills within gaming and
collaboration
• Opportunities for identity and
perspective-taking beyond the ingroup
Caveats…..
- Still an access gap, though narrowing
- Consumer culture, including consumerist
identity and consumer politics
- Separation of ‘school’ and ‘leisure’ culture
- ‘Managing’ of grassroots power
- Blogging only to the converted
- Illusion of power and free choice