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Essay / Generic Skills in Career and Technical Education the general skills required by most workplaces, thus providing a foundation for programs that prepare students for employment. Reform programs such as Tech Prep and High Schools that Work strive to incorporate these "generic" skills by providing students with rigorous academic training, technological skills development, and learning experiences situated in the context of real environments (Pucel 1999). ). Integrated academic and CTE programs and contextual learning efforts provide similar opportunities to promote the learning of generic skills by linking them to specific social and professional practices. Workplace learning experiences are another way to highlight the development of generic skills by placing students in professional situations where these generic skills are used in combination with professional or technical skills. Although the United States has adopted various strategies for teaching generic skills, it is not the only country to do so. Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom have launched similar programs to address generic skills development. In Australia, the integrated curriculum that integrates literacy into specific vocational courses has served to illustrate the need for multiple and contextualized literacies (Searle et al. 1999). Case Studies to Advance Skills and Employability, a project at the Universities of Northumbria and Newcastle, focused on the development of employability skills within the university curriculum (Holmes and Miller 2000). The contextual integration of employability skills into curricula has become a recent trend in Canada and the United Kingdom (Overtoom, 2000). Although there is evidence that generic skills are taught in schools, there is considerable ambiguity about their nature. Many terms have been used to describe them: key skills, core skills, transferable skills, personal transferable skills and employability skills. The list of skills defined by the term used varies depending on the country; however, most lists include communication skills, interpersonal and social skills, organization and planning skills, problem-solving skills, creative thinking, literacy, and technology skills. The Australian Key Competencies add “cultural understanding” as a generic competency (Werner 1995). Most attempts to define generic skills more precisely "have resulted in a plethora of superficially similar but often very different lists" (Drummond, Nixon and Wiltshire 1998, p. 20). Guile (2002) argues that definitions of generic skills are based on the complexity of the relationships they involve, which in turn drives the way skills are taught.
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