Authentic Help.
A simple way to envision authentic assignments.
In looking through various webpages for examples of authentic assignments, I became dissatisfied for two reasons:
so many educators equate authentic with “real life” (I ranted about this a couple of posts ago);
so many of the assignments were very discipline-specific, and those can be difficult to translate into other disciplines.
Photo by Noah Buscher on Unsplash
It was therefore a happy day when I came across “Authentic Writing Assignments,” a PDF from Elon University written by Paul Anderson and Deandra Little. I was especially happy with how they defined authentic assignments: “Authentic assignments ask students to perform the intellectual work—at an apprentice level—that people in your field perform. They place students in a real or realistic situation where the students must use the knowledge or skills they are learning in your course to help someone else (not you).” Finally, someone recognizing the intellectual aspect of an authentic assignment! That was music to my ears.
The Anderson/Little document also provides good arguments for bringing authenticity into courses: students are motivated by practical purpose; intellectually challenging work “extends the value of their courses”; authentic assignments can reduce the grading burden because they can be assessed “from the perspective of the readers (who are not the professor) in scenarios the instructors created.”
What the authors do is show you how to embed more traditional assignments within a scenario. Some may argue that this is not fully authentic, but rather “pretend authentic,” but not every course will have access to extrauniversity opportunity to put learning to work, so I’m not too bothered by that. Students adopt roles, and these roles have a key function in addressing the problem raised by the scenario. The authors provide three scenario examples from three different disciplines (macroeconomics, computer science, and feminist theory) as well as a handy chart for breaking down the scenarios in order to understand what their purpose is and how they help students learn.
Here’s the description of the macroeconomics scenario where students apply economic theory to a current economic policy (slightly shortened):
You have received an email from a friend who is having an argument with her boyfriend about the austerity measures that the European Union has required Spain and Greece to take before lending them money needed to avoid national bankruptcy. Her boyfriend, a sociologist, believes that, for all the hardship they cause for ordinary people, these measures will not revive the national economies. An engineer, your friend believes that without these measures, the loans from the European Union will be insufficient to revive the economies, resulting in even greater hardship. Knowing that you are taking a macroeconomics course, she asks you give her the reasons she can use to persuade him that she is correct or else to explain why he is right.
I had to laugh at this - haven’t we all received emails from friends requesting our help in resolving disputes about the Euro crisis? But the point of the exercise is sound: the student is required to write an email to their friend the engineer. This will require the student to use plain language to explain specific concepts, and that helps the student both learn the content of the course and gain some experience in translating complex theory into understandable language.
Paul Anderson and Deandra Little: thanks!
For Fall Term 2020 this blog will be exploring issues informing education during a pandemic. It is appearing as part of a graduate seminar on online teaching and learning. You can read more about the seminar or see the other posts.
Post 39/60.
