A Framework of Key Competences and New Literacies

This chapter presents the authors’ attempt to develop a conceptual framework of key competences and new literacies. We aspire to identify theoretical roots underpinning most of the other frameworks of the twenty-first century skills and, thus, offer a clue to their diversity. We analyzed over 180 national and international frameworks of key competences, trying to align them with seminal theories of cognition, development, language, personality, and learning. First, we learn to differentiate between synonyms and conceptually different elements in the frameworks, sorting out competences and literacies. Second, we divide the pool of new literacies into two fundamentally different sets: domain-general and domain-specific literacies (this lets us explain the substantive difference between, e.g., digital literacy and health literacy). Finally, we discuss the structural place of such influential concepts as problem-solving, decision-making, and learning-to-learn. The resulting framework accommodates the thinking and reasoning competence, the interpersonal competence, and the intrapersonal competence. Together with the instrumental (tool-mediated) kind of literacies (i.e., the wide use of communication tools based on sign systems), they are nested under the domain-general umbrella. Other new literacies belong to specific domains and require domain-specific knowledge, as well as domain-general competences and literacies as their prerequisites.