Does Competency-Based Education Spell the End of the Textbook Empire?

I have worked in four universities in the Gulf, and in three of them I lived through the renewal of existing programmes or the approval of new ones. One traditional habit appeared every time, especially in EFL and translation programmes, and even in education courses themselves: the rush to recommend textbooks, as if the entire knowledge frame lived in one or two books. I never once heard an institution use the word "competency" or "competence".

Why Competency Models Are Rare

Perhaps the competency model does not sit well with traditional publicly funded universities. They follow a curriculum paradigm that has run for over 150 years, inherited from primary and secondary schooling, and it usually leads to graduate unemployment and stagnation.

Competency models demand hard work, pedagogical engineering skills and ongoing updating. They prepare students for real, authentic, lifelong abilities. They are more dynamic and more rewarding for the twenty-first-century generation. They stress the link between society, the economy and the educational institution, and they require teachers and faculty to design learning and performance environments tailored to specific student needs, market demands and national priorities. It is a different world, and a more challenging one. Without genuine pedagogical know-how, faculty will struggle to engage with a competency model.

In EFL, authentic, customised, context- and work-oriented learning and performance environments, enhanced with experiential and project-based pedagogies, seem to be the way ahead.

Takeaway

Research is needed to revamp our curriculum practices and create meaningful learning and performance activities for our students. Linking with the world of practice through research and development is a key requirement in this endeavour.

What Should a Teacher Know? Beyond the PhD

A PhD or an MA in a discipline does not, by itself, make anyone a competent teacher. Teacher knowledge and competencies deserve to be discussed, explored and investigated, and nothing should be taken for granted.

The COVID experience added a whole new set of knowledge and skills to the inventory that instructors and future teachers, at every level, need to appreciate and be trained in. This holds in any discipline, and it makes professional development a certainty rather than an option. Research matters enormously in higher education, but pedagogical and instructional ability matters too, especially in professionally oriented disciplines and vocational training. Neither lecturing nor repetitive, experiential learning alone will fill the gap. We need a cluster of knowledge, skills and abilities.

Shulman (1986–1992) pointed to the importance of pedagogical and content knowledge, a key variable to align with when designing and developing courses. With the significant development of instructional technologies, a further paradigm emerged that adds the technology and pedagogy components to Shulman's framework: what Sharma (2009–2012) referred to as the TPCK (Technological, Pedagogical, Content Knowledge) framework, which teachers, instructors and faculty need to align with and implement, whether in K-12 or higher education. It is a more comprehensive and efficient approach: integrated, yet comprehensive and sustainable.

I will explore this theme, in general education and in its application to translation, interpreting, multilingual studies and EFL, in my upcoming podcasts.