Authentic Learning, Collateral Knowledge and the Importance of Audience

As a teacher, I've given a lot of thought to making learning meaningful and relevant for my students over the years.  I say "learning" because that is really what I hope I am teaching them—how to learn.  Of course making the content relevant is part of that process, but it's not always as easy or obvious as it sounds.  Whatever the content, there needs to be a sense of active, authentic participation for the students that will help them truly internalize the concepts and make it part of their own system of knowledge.  There is plenty of literature, as well as debate, about authentic learning, pedagogy, and assessment, but I want to consider just a few brief points.

AUTHENTIC LEARNING TASKS

After an extensive literature review of educational scholarship on "authentic learning tasks,"  Jan Herrington, Ron Oliver, and Thomas C. Reeves identified 10 key characteristics of authentic learning activities.  I am going to cherry-pick a few that really seem to meet the mission of the QEP program at ASU:

1. Have real-world relevance. Are ill-defined, requiring students to define the tasks and sub-tasks needed to complete the activity.
2. Comprised of complex tasks to be investigated by students over a sustained period of time.
3. Provide the opportunity for students to examine the task from different perspectives, using a variety of resources.
4. Provide the opportunity to collaborate.
5. Provide the opportunity to reflect.
6. Can be integrated and applied across different subject areas and lead beyond domain-specific outcomes.
7. Allow competing solutions and diverse outcomes.

In general, students engaged in these sorts of tasks are looking for answers, not "the one right answer." They are actively participating in the process, which makes the learning not only more authentic, but more personal.  Moreover, they are asked to collaborate and reflect, which gives them the opportunity to connect to other learners and share information as well as building their own meta-cognitive skills, which better prepares them for the reality of life after academia. This is how people continue to learn and work after school is over. Will there be someone out there to always give them the right answer if they get it wrong?  Will they know how to look for the answer or explore the possibilities and narrow it down to the reasonable answer?  Not if we don't practice it.  Life is not a bubble sheet.

COLLATERAL KNOWLEDGE

I don't know if anyone has used this term before, but it seems to fit the phenomenon that accompanies good teaching strategies. In the NCLB panic that has left school systems across the country diving into into the CYA bunkers of the war on illiteracy, collateral knowledge has been sacrificed in the name of self-preservation.  Yes, thanks to vague language and misguided implementation, NCLB has lead many educators to "teach to the test" rather than to facilitate learning in order to cover their asses and get satisfactory numbers on the standardized test. But have the student's really learned anything through that approach? Or have they simply been drilled on certain facts and constructs that will evaporate ten minutes after the test is over?  In one particularly horrific example, a school system has mandated a "concept education" approach, which strips a course like English Literature down to a cataloged list of naked concepts taught out of context.  Students may read a chapter of THE GREAT GATSBY only as an example of some theme, but they will never read the novel as a whole.  Once they have written a paragraph about the dangers of wealth or the demise of the American dream, they move on to something else without ever really seeing the concept at work.  It's a meaningless blip in a catalog of disconnected terms.

If the learning is authentic, the knowledge is permanent. If you look at the really good teachers who have continued to facilitate learning in the classroom and use creative, student-centered approaches, the students will learn the content and they will perform well on the tests.  A good case in point is an interdisciplinary course taught by Carl Rosin and Paul Wright at Radnor High School in West Philadelphia.  While the course was not labeled as an AP course, Rosin and Wright encouraged their students to take the AP Language and Composition test simply because they realized that the course material seemed to be compatible with the test.  They did not teach to the test, but offered another application for the knowledge the students would gain from taking the course.  They scored exceptionally well across the board.  That is collateral knowledge at work.  It is sustainable and transferable.

AUDIENCE

No matter what the content area—science, social studies, English—students must write.  It's a life skill and an integral part of the learning process itself.  However, many writing assignments come to a student, laid out with all the do's and don'ts and word limits, etc., but fail to clearly identify the audience.  The reasonable assumption is that the audience is the teacher, and the teacher alone.  One way we can make these learning tasks more authentic is by defining and utilizing a variety of audiences.

To  get a feeling for how my students think and write and to learn a little more about their life experience, I asked my ENGL 1102 students to write a "This I Believe" essay for NPR.  Their audience with the NPR audience, not just me.  I encouraged them to get personal and shared some examples from the NPR website.  I was amazed and thrilled with the essays I received.  Not all of them were beautifully written or well organized, but they had guts.  The students had used writing to face issues that were tough or funny or uncomfortable or sad.  They still had to follow some basic grammar guidelines and word-count restrictions, but they explored.  Themselves.  After I handed their papers back, I read aloud my own "This I Believe" essay, which I had written the day before.  That simple act transformed the classroom.  It changed my students' attitudes, just a little, towards writing and literature and perhaps even why they were there.  We went on to examine the relevance of great literature like HAMLET and "A Good Man is Hard to Find" and other challenging pieces and they saw something personal in it.

Oh, I'm guilty of assigning those essays that assume the teacher is the only audience too, but over the years I have tried to pay more attention to that and offer more meaningful parameters.  Having students teach each other is a powerful strategy.  You might have them write a children's book about a topic (a very difficult task, indeed!).  One business professor asked his students to write up a business conceptualization.  Students could contact an existing business or make up their own business and write up a plan to maximize profits, quality, service, efficiency, etc.  In the science room, you might give them a conference to write for or a demonstration to a specific group of people.  Invite the outside world into the process and give your students something authentic, something real, something personal. Something sustainable.