Parallel Content.
A much better term than “soft skills.”
For years humanities and even some social sciences programs have had to justify their existence by demonstrating that they weren’t just obsessed with disciplinary knowledge, but that they could also equip students with the tools they would need to make it in the “real world” (ugh, that term). At some point the term “soft skills” was coined. Depending what your Google search pulls up, you’ll learn that soft skills are those qualities that allow you to fit into the workplace, or are “skills you developed beyond your technical competencies and intellectual knowledge.” Hard skills, on the other hand, are technical skills and abilities - the stuff of engineering, not the squishy humanities.
Career websites love listing soft skills. Here’s a list from the Indeed Career Guide:
Communicating effectively
Ability to work well in a team
Dependability
Adaptability
Ability to resolve conflicts
Flexibility
Leadership skills
Problem-solving
Research
Creative expression
Humility
Altruism
Photo by Adrian Trinkaus on Unsplash
To list research and communicating effectively — two of the central skills taught in humanities or social sciences programs — as soft, non-technical skills is to display profound ignorance of the amount of study and training necessary to achieve proficiency in those areas. (To list humility and altruism as skills at all is to ignore centuries of moral and ethical teaching.) But there they are. What are educators to do with such a list?
The short answer is nothing at all: it’s a ridiculous list. The longer answer, however, is to acknowledge that humanities and social science courses do equip students with valuable skills, and that we shouldn’t devalue them by calling them soft. They’re skills, pure and simple, and developing them will stand anyone in good stead.
Ohio State University’s Center for the Advancement of Teaching has addressed this issue in an effective manner. Whenever instructors plan a course, they have to consider what disciplinary content to include (which novels, which theories, which events, etc). The OSU Center also suggests considering what Parallel Content should be highlighted or emphasized. This is a very tidy solution: instructors can centre their courses on the information from their field, but they can also help students understand the skills they’ll acquire by studying that content. OSU lists the following examples of Parallel Content:
communication skills: writing, oral presentation, visual communication
rhetorical skills: an ability to persuade others
collaborative skills: an ability to work with others
technological skills: an ability with a particular technology important to a discipline or career
research skills: abilities to read about and understand (and maybe conduct) particular kinds of research (e.g., surveys, ethnographies, textual analysis)
analytical skills: abilities to analyze certain kinds of documents and/or situations (e.g., medical, nutritional, psychological, etc., diagnoses; historical analyses)
critical thinking skills: ability to think independently and maturely
cognitive skills: meta-cognition, reflection, self-regulation, self-motivation
creativity: inventiveness
Nothing soft about that list! You’ll notice the similarities with the previous list, but you’ll also notice how OSU elaborates more clearly the technical, “hard” nature of these skills. Calling them parallel content signals that this content runs alongside the disciplinary content of the course, complementing and expanding it by demonstrating to students that studying the stuff of the course will equip them with useful skills. Win-win.
For Fall Term 2020 this blog will be exploring issues informing education during a pandemic. It is appearing as part of a graduate seminar on online teaching and learning. You can read more about the seminar or see the other posts.
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