What is Authentic Learning?

Hello everyone,

 

I hope that you are having a wonderful week.  It’s hard to believe that we are more than a quarter of the way through the school year.  The days are flying by, and given the warm weather, it does not feel like we are rapidly approaching winter.

 

I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about the word authentic and what it means with regards to education.  On our Dawson Facebook page, we mentioned something about authentic learning, and someone asked, “When is learning not authentic?”  Hmmm….great question, and it made me think hard about what we mean when we say we want our students to learn in authentic ways.

 

One definition of authentic is quite simple: “not false or copied; genuine, real.” As in, “I purchased an authentic Warhol painting for my living room.” So what does that mean as far as education goes?  How can we make sure that learning is genuine or real?  If learning is occurring, isn’t just the fact of that learning happening authentic?  This is an interesting idea, and there is some truth to it.  If learning can be defined as “the act or process of acquiring knowledge,” how can we determine whether it’s authentic or not?  And frankly, why does it matter, if learning is happening either way?

 

Well, here’s what I think.  Yes, learning can happen in inauthentic ways.  When students are asked to memorize a series of dates or a list of vocabulary words with no context, they may learn those dates and words well enough to perform on an assessment, but the likelihood of their remembering them beyond the assessment is small because there is no connection to their own lives or to other areas of study.  Similarly, a student may be able to do math computation based on having memorized an algorithm but then often cannot apply that math knowledge to a problem.  There is a famous video taken at MIT that asks recent graduates (still in their caps and gowns) if they can light a bulb with a battery and a wire.  Sadly, many of them don’t know how to solve this fairly simple problem despite the many hours they have spent in various math, science, and engineering classes.  They are obviously incredibly intelligent people who have acquired a great deal of knowledge.  But being able to apply that knowledge, to demonstrate a basic understanding of circuitry? Not so much.

 

When my husband was in eighth grade, there were two different American history teachers teaching two very different classes.  One teacher, the one my husband was fortunate enough to have, engaged students daily in student-led inquiry projects.  In order to learn about what our Founding Fathers went through starting a new country, they created their own societies.  In order to learn about the Constitution, they held their own constitutional convention.  Their teacher empowered them to live the history, to really experience it so they could understand the intricacies of decisions that were made.

 

In contrast, the other teacher spent the entire class writing notes on the board – notes that were essentially copied from the American history textbook, and students copied down the notes themselves.  No discussion, no questions, just straight-up dissemination of information.  Looking back at this experience, my husband still remembers much of what he learned because he had the chance to apply his understanding and to work together with his classmates to find solutions to problems.  But at the time, he remembers feeling like the other class was learning more, simply because their notebooks were filled with more information. While I haven’t met anyone who was in that other class to be able to ask them about their experience, I would wager that those students retained very little during that year that has stayed with them.  They may have “learned” a good deal of information at the time, but with nothing to connect it to or no way to apply the learning to a new situation, it undoubtedly did not stay with them.

 

One definition of authentic that I really like is, “representing one’s true nature or beliefs.”  We talk often about how we can best encourage our students to discover their passions, to figure out what they love and then to figure out how to use this passion to make a difference.