Authentic learning

In his 1970 book Deschooling Society, the radical philosopher Ivan Illich wrote: 'Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting. Most people learn best by being "with it," yet school makes them identify their personal, cognitive growth with elaborate planning and manipulation.' 

This is a real challenge to many schools. Some of the most effective learning methods involve students doing and making, problem solving, and playing games, all of which comply with the notion of being in a meaningful setting. This kind of situated learning is powerful because it immerses students in contexts that are authentic. Medical students learn through problem based learning, often a complex situated form of education that places them in the role of decision maker. Pilots do a lot of their training in simulators, where 'real life' problems and challenges can be presented to them, and to which they must respond. This kind of learning, according to Jean Lave (1988), is powerful because it is rooted in context, and avoids much of the abstract nature of content that is delivered traditionally. Brown, Collins and Duguid (1989) agree, believing that authentic learning contexts are vitally important if students are to acquire and develop cognitive skills that are transferable to real world living. 

So how do we bring these powerful ideas into school classrooms? Often, we see children bored or demotivated because they are presented with content that is abstract and meaningless, or without a specific context or 'situatedness'. It's not all bad news though. There is evidence that some schools are beginning to adopt authentic learning methods. Saltash.net, a school near to my home, managed to get around this issue by placing children in situations where they had to use tools and techniques to solve real life problems. In their small working farm located within the grounds of the school, they kept chickens, pigs and goats. The children took turns managing the farm, and were often required to purchase food for the animals, or sell eggs at the market. To do this they needed to know about how a market operates, and had to understand concepts such as supply and demand, profit and loss, sell by dates, and so on. Teaching them how to use an Excel spreadsheet would have been dull and boring if it was kept within the four walls of a classroom or ICT suite. Taking this skill outside and putting them in a position where they had to learn by applying spreadsheets to the problem of buying of corn and the selling of eggs at a good price and maintaining records placed their learning within a meaningful setting. There are endless examples of situated learning in a school near you. 

In one American school I visited, teachers chose two students each day who were tasked to edit and present the following day's morning news programme on school radio. All of the children took it in turns to be the morning DJs and news presenters, and their responsibility was to make sure their school was kept up to date on current affairs through their research, editing, filtering and presentation. Many schools in the UK are adopting the School Radio approach too, and children are relishing the challenge of informing their classmates and teachers, deciding on music playlists, reporting on weather and sport, while acquiring authentic critical, organisational and reflective skills. This is learning by stealth, and it is incredibly powerful.

Ultimately, it is the teacher's role to create learning contexts that support authentic learning. If teachers can situate learning in meaningful contexts and real life (or realistic) settings, not only will students become more motivated, they will also acquire authentic transferable skills that they can call upon for the rest of their lives.

References
Brown, J.S., Collins, A. and Duguid, S. (1989) Situated cognition and the culture of learning. Educational Researcher, 18(1), 32-42.
Illich, I. (1970) Deschooling Society. London: Marion Boyars Ltd.
Lave, J. (1988) Cognition in Practice: Mind, Mathematics and Culture in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Photo by Cobalt123


Authentic learning by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Light the blue touch paper...

Should teachers try to create order from chaos? Or should we try to achieve the opposite - turning order into chaos? Let me explain. The human mind naturally and subconsciously seeks order, pattern, closure - the Gestalt psychology experiments of Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Kohler from the previous century has established that. We are oh so comfortable with order and predictability. We know what is coming next, we can control it, and it doesn't tax our minds that much. But for today's schools and universities, where we should be trying to 'draw out from within', surely order and predictability run counter to creative learning and self-driven critical enquiry. Shouldn't we be taking learners outside their comfort zones? For far too long, schools have been providing learners with definitive answers to sterile questions, and there is usually only one answer. Yet we can do so much more by encouraging students to question for themselves. We would see a great deal more evidence of critical thinking if we taught students to question more and answer less. One of my colleagues once said that he preferred to send his students out of the classroom confused. That way, they would be more likely to resolve their own cognitive dissonance by going off and doing some personal research to see if they could resolve their own confusion.

So should be try to achieve chaos from order? Should we attempt to subvert the ordered, linear curricula that we are commanded and expected to deliver? Should teachers try to create uncertain, and dare I say it - dangerous - environments within which students can question and argue? Do we need anarchy in the school system? Sugata Mitra, who is famous for his Hole in the Wall experiments, believes in what he calls minimally invasive education, where students can use tools to find out for themselves. He argues that all the answers are already there on the web for learners to discover for themselves. The new roles of teachers are to ask timely and relevant questions - searching ones that will stretch students and cause them to research for themselves. For a long time problem based learning has been a mainstay of the training of medical students. Present the students with a problem, and they will need to find a solution to resolve the dissonance. Along with many others, I have taken this a step farther by presenting my students with ill-structured problems. These are problems that have very few parameters and very little information. Students are forced to 'fill in the gaps' usually drawing on previous knowledge, before they can find their own personal solutions to the problem. Moreover, there are many possible solutions to ill-structured problems.

Such problem based learning takes a little time, and with the addition of a shared discussion space, develops over time, but the understanding of the topic is ultimately far deeper than if students were served up the answers on a plate. Maurice Holt provides an excellent argument for 'slower education' in his blog post Fresh Thinking about Schooling, and I quote:

"Since education is essentially about equipping our children with the ability to act responsibly in a complex society, the idea of a Slow School follows very readily from the metaphor of Slow. It brings to mind an institution where students have time to discuss, argue, and reflect upon knowledge and ideas, and so come to understand themselves and the culture they will inherit."

Much of the power of setting ill-structured problems for students is that they can post their solutions (and the reasoning behind them) onto shared online spaces such as wikis, where they will then have the task to defend their solution against criticism from the rest of the group. Students also have licence to attack the solutions of their peers. Learners need to think on their feet against all comers, and of course they learn by synthesising the best elements from other people's solutions. So, light the blue touch paper, stand back, and let the chaos commence....

Image source by Christopher Hubenthal


Light the blue touch paper... by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.