New Zealand’s, Learning Progressions document (Tertiary Education Commission, 2008) uses the term “competencies” to describe the skills, knowledge and attitudes needed to meet demands or carry out tasks successfully.
Internationally, there is general agreement that language, literacy and numeracy competencies are foundation competencies which underpin the learning and performance of all other generic competencies (for example, the ability to work co-operatively) as well as of specialized skills needed in home, work, educational and social settings.
Unfortunately, there has been significantly less development of other contexts in the way of resources or examples so that the perception of Essential Skills exclusively as an occupational language was perhaps not surprising.
A numeracy report (Ginsburg, Manly & Schmitt, 2006), published by the National Center for the Study of Adult Literacy and Learning in the U.S., described a simple model that helped the team examine the relationship of academic and functional skills. Although the model focused specifically on numeracy, the team felt that it was equally applicable to literacy.
The model identifies three major components that “form and construct” numeracy (and literacy):
Context and content can be positioned in LBS/AU programs according to the purpose or focus of the program. With content as the primary organizing principle, emphasis is on the development of knowledge. The ability to demonstrate knowledge and skills is a concern to programs that provide credentials or prepare students for further education and training. With context as the primary organizing principle, the development of skills is carried out within specific contexts and for specific purposes. Contextualized learning helps learners draw from their prior learning to build new knowledge and transfer knowledge to new contexts. The context should match the purpose.
Sticht says that practitioners can contextualize their programs based on an analysis of the knowledge and skills needed for the home, community, technical training, employment or the academic context for which the learner is preparing. Practitioners can use tasks, materials and procedures taken from the future situation in which the learner will be functioning. But this needs to be balanced with the large bodies of knowledge that readers need to provide a context for what they read, “This makes it possible for highly literate readers to contend with poorly designed materials or materials that are poorly contextualized” (p. 78).
Finding a good balance between content and context for each transition path depends on the learner’s goal for education. LBS/AU is both learner-centred and goal-directed. The discussion surrounding context and content resulted in an additional criterion for determining the distinctness of each transition path, i.e., primary organizing principle. This criterion proved to be useful in gaining a clearer understanding of the instructional focus for each path. Nevertheless, debate continued about the role of Essential Skills in academic programming. In the final stages of the project, Dr. Theresa Kline assisted in an advisory capacity on issues related to framework validity.