A Didactical Reflection on Competency-Based Liberal Arts Education

Abstract

This study reflects on the educational validity of competency-based liberal arts education, and aims to enhance its feasibility and secure its sustainability. It also aims to clarify the educational conditions and circumstances of competency-based liberal arts education in a didactical manner, which ultimately attempts to encourage the recovery of educational authenticity in the context of actual practice. Even though the concept of competency emerged within the vocational training context, it has been re-conceptualized within the context of school education through the evolution of <i>introduction-diffusion-transformation</i>. Thus, it is time to overcome the conceptual confusion of competency discourse and to collect educational wisdom. The concept of competency should permeate into the pedagogical realm in terms of aims, content, methods and evaluation of liberal arts education. As to the educational aim, competency should guide the overall liberal arts education as the real power that drives ‘well-being’. Regarding its content, subjects in the liberal arts education should be restructured into a dynamic whole in which knowledge, skills, attitude and values are all blended together in a trans-boundary way. In terms of methods, the essential meaning of learning should be based more on student agency, allowing for learners to think more for themselves and to act autonomously. Regarding evaluation, the conventional formal diagnosis, with its instrumental and measurement-focused approach, should be converted into a more narrative evaluation in order to draw each student’s existential reflection. Based on the past 2500 years of history, liberal arts education might be summed up with one word: reinterpretation. In the same spirit, the post-human and post-Covid era requests a brand-new liberal arts education. Competency-based liberal arts education should be reborn as educational transformation that widens the prospect of liberal education in the 21<sup>st</sup> century.