Transversal Competencies have been at the center of one of the largest educational policy and curriculum changes of the past 25 years, and most governments in Europe and worldwide now include them in their education policies (Care & Luo, 2016; Kim, Care, & Ditmore, 2017; UNESCO, 2016). These skills – initially called 21^st century skills – have long been seen as essential for students’ future success in our rapidly changing world. Originally promoted in part as a response to the then-emerging Knowledge Economy (Drucker, 1969; Powell & Snellman, 2004), they are seen now as even more important in an age of uncertainty. It is argued that understanding transversal competencies and meaningfully integrating them into curricula can provide students with the tools to navigate and thrive in the society and economy of the future.

Though no single, definitive list of transversal competencies exists, most frameworks agree on the importance of creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, and communication – the so-called 4Cs. However, these 4Cs have been shown to be less empirically distinct than other transversal competencies (e.g., self-direction and using ICT for learning), indicating that the 4Cs may be difficult concepts to clearly define (Ravitz, 2014). In terms of the barriers to implementing transversal competencies in curricula worldwide, this definitional deficit compounds the operational-systemic (lack of resources and expertise) challenges faced by teachers (Care & Luo, 2016; UNESCO, 2015).

From a global equality perspective, it is known that major gaps exist for traditional skills in reading and mathematics between countries with different income levels. It is therefore not surprising that a gap also exists for transversal competencies (World Economic Forum, 2015). Furthermore, there is a gap in the literature as to how teachers in diverse global contexts understand transversal competencies in the first place. Thus, the focus of this research is to explore teachers’ understandings of transversal competencies in diverse global contexts. The theoretical framework adopted is pragmatism, highlighting what really works in the context that teachers find themselves in. This study centers specifically on an explorative case study with teachers from Europe and South Asia.

From a methodological perspective, there is a further focus on the use of the “World Café” brainstorming method as a data collection mechanism. Various methods were considered for this research, which undertook the complex task of eliciting and capturing understandings of difficult-to-define concepts. The World Café (Brown, 2002) offers a research activity in which participants can co-construct conceptualizations of amorphous ideas. It also provides a structure which is simple and flexible enough for use in diverse global contexts where cultural differences, language, resources, and access can all prove barriers to generating and collecting data. These advantages align with the theoretical framework of pragmatism, mentioned above, and the World Café matched as a promising method that might really work in the abstract and physical contexts of this research.

Thus, the research questions posed are:

• How do teachers in diverse global contexts understand transversal competencies?
• Is the “World Café” a useful method for eliciting and capturing teachers’ understandings of concepts which are difficult to define?

The work reported on here focuses on qualitative data collection using the World Café method, a group brainstorming activity (Brown, 2002) which produces written artifacts. During each World Café session, teachers work in small groups, writing together on large posters, systematically rotating around the room to different posters. In this way, the groups see and expand on what previous groups have written. In this explorative case study, which is part of a larger piece of research, four posters were used in each of 16 World Café sessions. Teachers wrote down definitions and examples of the 4Cs, thereby co-constructing and capturing a snapshot of their understandings. 212 teachers from Europe (127) and South Asia (85), representing two embedded cases, participated in World Café sessions within the context of a larger continuing professional development workshop. These primary and secondary teachers came from public and private schools in the Czech Republic (43), India (17), Ireland (34), Nepal (68), and Spain (32). This sample is not generalizable, but it is illuminative as a case study, as it provides a diverse range of teachers’ understandings. The resulting artifacts were transcribed and, when necessary, translated to English. The resulting text was subjected to several rounds of directed content analysis (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005) coding using NVivo software. The first round focused on deductively matching teachers’ definitions and examples against an existing set of descriptors of transversal competencies (Ravitz, 2014). Anything that did not match these descriptors was subjected to several rounds of inductive coding, where emerging codes were iteratively assigned and reassigned. The results of each embedded case were then analyzed using Excel to identify emerging trends. The World Café method engendered and helped capture fruitful brainstorming, yielding 1014 codes over 16 sessions (~63 codes per session) with European teachers (E) writing about twice as much as South Asian teachers (SA) on the posters. The data analysis revealed several findings: 1) Three key themes for describing the 4Cs emerged: skills for social interaction (SSI), student-centered learning (SCL), and teacher-directed learning (TDL). 2) All teachers strongly associated SCL with creativity (E-90%, SA-91%) and critical thinking (E-87%, SA-85%). 3) All teachers somewhat strongly associated SCL with collaboration (E-70%, SA-67%) and communication (E-51%, SA-66%). 4) SSI was also associated with collaboration (E-29%, SA-35%) and communication (E-42%, SA-18%). 5) TDL was somewhat associated with communication (E-9%, SA-18%).

This study seeks 1) to provide insight into how teachers in diverse global contexts understand transversal competencies, and 2) to concurrently explore the World Café method for group brainstorming as a means for eliciting and capturing teachers’ understandings. The findings to date point to several key trends in teachers’ understandings of transversal competencies in diverse global contexts. There is much common ground across the understandings of the teachers who participated, especially in associating student-centered learning with the 4Cs, most strongly for creativity and critical thinking. This common understanding is in spite of fears raised about definitional deficits (UNESCO, 2015). The main exceptions to the broad consensus were that 1) European teachers more strongly associated communication with skills for social interaction, and that 2) South Asian teachers somewhat associated teacher-directed learning with communication. These outliers might reflect cultural and/or socio-economic differences, which might be illuminated with participant validation and further research. Finally, the World Café appears to have been a compelling research method for eliciting and capturing teachers’ understandings of a complex and nebulous concept, in this case transversal competencies. European teachers wrote at a rate double that of their South Asian colleagues, which calls for participant validation to investigate cultural factors. Even so, the activity stimulated a great deal of brainstorming and discussion across the diverse contexts of the case study.

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