Authenticity.
There’s more to life than the real world.
When he was in hospital with COVID-19, Donald Trump released a video in which he said the following:
I learned a lot about COVID. I learned it by really going to school. This is the real school. This isn’t the let’s-read-the-books school. And I get it and I understand it.
I don’t know what the “it” is that he learned or got. “Get what” I asked myself when I saw the video, “other than a life-threatening disease?”
Photo by Siora Photography on Unsplash
A lot of people were put off by Trump’s braggadocio, with good reason. But I was more annoyed about his endorsement of the idea that what we learn in school is just “book learnin’.” Donald Trump is not the first person, nor will he be the last, to call into question the value of institutionalized education. I don’t have the time or the patience to defend universities and schools, but I do want to examine how the belief that “book learnin’ ain’t real learnin’” is affecting how we teach.
In the drive to make university education more engaging and relevant for students, there has been a parallel self-defeating drive to spurn book learnin’ in favour of real world learnin’. The emphasis on experiential learning and entrepreneurship at universities and colleges is predicated on the notion that the best way to learn is to actually do, not just think about doing or how to do.
You also see it in more subtle forms when you consider the shift taking place in assessment. Summative assessment (where a student is evaluated on their recall of the knowledge they’ve gained) is seen less favourably than it once was. Replacing it as the apple of many an educator’s eye is formative assessment where students receive ongoing feedback that helps them figure out what they’ve learnt and what they still need to work on.
The assignments that are used to provide summative assessments are often called disposable assignments. You study for the test, you take the test, you get your grade on the test, then you throw the test away - that’s the gist of a disposable assignment. The alternative, known as non-disposable assignments, are more authentic; students care about them more, not just because they help them understand their progress as opposed to measuring it, but also because the assignments focus on “real world situations.”
In their book Assessment Strategies for Online Learning, Dianne Conrad and Jason Openo outline the trend towards authentic assessments:
Authentic assessments are based in real-world relevance. Authentic assessments include activities that closely match real-world tasks undertaken by practitioners (Herrington, Oliver, & Reeves, 2006). They are designed to actively engage students in their own learning by using real-life situations, requiring students to make connections and forge relationships between prior knowledge and skills, and allowing for multiple pathways for solutions and a diversity of perspectives (Moon, Brighton, Callahan, & Robinson, 2005).
Having students “make connections” and use “multiple pathways” to solve problems is desirable because it gets students to apply what they know and to become self-reliant. Creating authentic learning situations for students has merit; of that there’s no doubt. But you’ll have noticed that, again and again, the notion of the real word comes up, and this is a bother. It’s the limited horizon of the argument that learning needs to be anchored in the “real world” that should concern us as educators. In the “real world” of the authenticists, contemplative study has no value, and skills like interpreting literature will have no place. But what’s not real about literature, a human past-time since humans developed language? What’s not real about the life of the mind? All of us have one, even the man whose video I quoted at the beginning of this post.
The push towards non-disposable assignments is worthwhile. Just don’t let it push certain subjects out the door. We can make good use of non-disposable assignments in less career-oriented disciplines by demonstrating that authenticity also applies within education itself and not just in the “real world.” Our universities, and the societies which they serve, will be the richer for it.
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.
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