Skills Development for Employability and Life for the 21st Century

Dr. Ottilia Goto brings more than two decades of dedicated classroom experience to her current role as Head of Languages at a high school in Marondera, Zimbabwe. She previously taught Cambridge English Language and Literature at the college in Chinhoyi for 21 years, also holding leadership positions as Head of English (2015–2023) and Head of Culture (2023). After a brief detour from the classroom to serve as a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Johannesburg, she returned to her current leadership role. This deep, practical understanding of pedagogy informs her research and professional development work. Holding a Ph.D. in Curriculum Studies, Dr. Goto focuses on the intersection of education and technology. She has spent extensive time interrogating the role of 21st-century skills in African settings, questioning whether Western educational philosophies can be adopted without critical consideration of local contexts. This informs her active involvement in teacher professional development, where she specialises in higher-order thinking, critical thinking, and teaching with AI in the classroom. Her work on large language models and machine learning tackles a crucial question for the future: as technology evolves, what is the role of the teacher in the classrooms of tomorrow?