21st-Century Education or the Awakening of the Sleeping Beauties: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Although 21st-century education has been widely debated and presented in the literature, the reality of today’s schools, especially in developing countries, shows a very distant image of what should be a flexible, personalized, soft skills-oriented education, based on the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). To address this situation should be the first step in order to understand it and provide concrete work elements for teachers, school principals and policymakers, especially for those who work in adverse educational contexts. This article presents a systematic literature review focused on the identification of critical ideas about 21st-century education as possible factors of a transformation of the current school. The review included 780 research reports on 21st-century education, which were coded and processed through text mining. A selection of 101 reports was read in-depth and qualitatively analyzed. The results revealed that although most of the critical ideas related to 21st-century education are not brand new, they are flourishing, like sleeping beauties, with new possibilities of implementation due to the evolution of current technological development. Some of the educational sleeping beauties to highlight are personal learning paths, research-based teaching, open, flexible and digitally supported curriculum, and lifelong learning.