Problem-Oriented Project Learning: Are we doing 21st century skills?

Many Higher Education institutions across the world aspire to produce graduates with ‘21st century skills’, which is a concept developed as a response to the changing needs of the workforce in the digital age. The OECD's work on 21st century skills is based on the assumption that reproductive academic knowledge is no longer sufficient, and that education should instead focus on enhancing students’ critical thinking and problem solving, creativity, innovation and self-direction, etc. The discourse of 21st century skills has become an official institutional-level way of formulating educational aims. Questions become how to ‘design’ for these skills and which educational activities better meet these aims than others. Some so-called reform universities like to claim that they produced 21st century skills before it became a marketable concept, and in the case of Roskilde University, with its specific educational approach, Problem-oriented Project Learning (PPL), it is in many ways taken for granted that that is what ‘we’ do. In this paper, we discuss what it might mean to brand one’s educational approach in that way. What educational imaginaries and discourses are invoked, and which are marginalized or even tabooed?