Beyond Key Skills: Exploring Capabilities

1. Beyond Key Skills: Exploring Capabilities Geoff Hinchliffe, UEA

2. Problems with Key Skills • Assumes a spurious value-free approach to learning and development • aids a narrow technicist agenda, driven by human capital theory, that can inhibit deep learning • blandly assumes that transfer of skills is non-problematic • reflects the undue influence of competence-based learning which most HE academics mistrust • Despite much talk of contextualising/embedding/integrating key skills into the curriculum this is not always easy to do • Many students do not engage with key skills unless compelled to do so • Signs that students that do engage develop a ‘tick-box’ approach to key skills, perhaps because these are presented to them as discrete competences in the form of a list

3. Benefits of Key Skills Agenda • Encourages a richer learner development through, e.g. a variety of assessment methods • Promotes value of experiental and reflective learning (e.g. through deployment of Kolb’s learning cycle), especially when linked to personal development • Helped develop view that HE has a responsibility for the all-round (holistic) development of student experience (e.g. with respect to their employability)

4. Current Position on Skills • Wide acceptance of need to include skills development, in some form, as part of a curriculum • Acknowledgement that there is no ‘going back’ to the position before key skills • But criticisms of key skills as pertinent as ever • In particular, there is a difficulty of making key skills intellectually interesting and challenging for teachers let alone students • We need a way forward that retains the advantages of key skills but also deals with the criticisms. • We should also recognise that giving UEA students key skills doesn’t give them any particular advantage in the graduate labour market

5. Capabilities • Concept first developed by Indian economist, Amartya Sen, 25 years ago, through investigation of redistribution policies • Sen wondered if economists’ focus on goods/resources or utility(satisfaction) levels was misplaced • Suggested we ask what persons are capable of actually doing with their lives rather than how much income they have • Suggested that capabilities amount to substantive freedoms (as opposed to formal or procedural freedoms) • Martha Nussbaum, American philosopher, suggested that capabilities are also constitutive of a person’s well-being or flourishing

6. Capabilities and functions • Sen suggested that capabilities are linked to what he called human ‘functioning’: a capability was the capacity or potential to function in a certain way • A person’s ‘capability set’ could enable a range of functionings • E.g. to function as a citizen requires a complex capability set (ability to express oneself, to respect others, be respected by others, access to information, levels of understanding, etc) • So no one-to-one relation between functionings and capabilities • But functioning is an index of capability: capability is evidenced through a range of what might be called ‘functioning-achievements’

7. Capabilities- a few observations • For Sen, the link between capability and freedom is paramount: having a capability gives you the freedom to act but doesn’t compel you in any way • Sen resistant to producing a list of capabilities: thinks these are context-dependent to be worked out by people on the ground • Whereas Nussbaum is not averse to identifying a set of capabilities that anyone, anywhere, needs to have if they are to flourish (e.g. health, practical reasoning, affiliation)

8. Capabilities and skills • We can see a capability as a certain mix of skills, dispositions and understandings. A capability also points to potentialities and possibilities rather than oucomes that can be defined in advance • This seems to take us beyond the simplistic key skills approach (e.g. a capability could include ethical/cultural understandings) • Thinking of abilities in this way would discourage the ‘tick-box’ approach • The links between capability and freedom/human well being means that we have an approach to holistic development that is not driven solely by human capital theory • At the same time the development of a capability set can contribute to employability as well

9. Capability in HE (1) • Need to distinguish the capability of learning from the learning of capabilities – is there a distinctive capability of learning ? • If so, the link between capability and functionning obliges us to think of learning both as a capability and as a functioning achievement: so at each stage of learning we ask: what can the student now do that he/she couldn’t do before • An important dimension pointed out by Melanie Walker (Higher Education Pedagogies, 2005) is the development of agency: the capability has to be recognised and ‘owned’ by the student. At the same time, the development of capabilities also develops agent-empowerment.

10. Capability in HE (2) • Is HE only concerned with learning or is it concerned also with other capabilities as well ? • If HE is concerned with a range of capabilities can these be developed through teaching/learning or should this be supplemented in some way? • Is there a ‘capability set’ that we think we ought to help each student develop ? E.g. should students be encouraged to construct their own capability set within certain broad guidelines ? • Is there a capability set associated with students of English ?

11. Capability in HE (3) • A workshop with Development Studies ug’s identified the following capabilities: • Critical judgement • Listening • Self Expression • Organisational

12. Suggested Capabilities for Humanities students could include: • Critical Examination and Judgement • Narrative imagination • Recognition/concern for others (citizenship in a globalised world) (See Martha Nussbaum’s Cultivating Humanity) • Reflective learning (ability to articulate and revise personal aims) • Practical judgement (in relatively complex situations) • Take responsibility for others