Authenticity is one of those concepts that often come up in discussions on assessments as well as classroom activities. Driven by a desire to improve our teaching materials, me and some colleagues at the Centre for Academic Language and Development have decided to do some reading around the different conceptualisations of authenticity. What follows is an attempt to make sense of this discussion within the current HE landscape.
During this research, it became clear that authenticity is a multidimensional phenomenon. Three main dimensions seem to emerge from the literature: for something to be authentic (this something could be a task or a text or a context), it needs to:
- Be sufficiently challenging
- Be something students can relate to and find interesting
- Encourage students to act as part of a community
Let’s look at the first dimension: a certain level of challenge seems to be needed. Two reasons are usually given to justify this. The first reason is that, for learning to occur, students should be working on tasks that are neither too easy nor too difficult. Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development is often cited to back this up. The second reason is to do with the “outside world” (i.e. the world outside the classroom walls): it is undeniable that there are a lot of challenges that as a society we are trying to face, and there’s an expectation that academia should help. This is why assessments are often informed by Problem-Based Learning, and these assessments often ask students to work with messy problems (e.g. the Sustainable Development Goals) sometimes adopting an interdisciplinary approach so to add a further level of complexity. This concern with preparing students for the “real world” also explains the interest around employability and graduate attributes.
At this point, if you’re concerned that some aspects of your teaching might not be very authentic, you might be overthinking. Some argue that it is the goal that has to be authentic, but how you get students to achieve it (i.e. the process) doesn’t necessarily have to be. This is what is known as “pedagogic appropriacy”.
The second theme emerging from the literature is that for a teaching context to be authentic, it should give students the opportunity to be their authentic selves. This is perhaps where authenticity meets engagement:students are more likely to engage if they can relate to the content of the lesson because there is consistency between their values and their actions. And this is perhaps why curricula across HE are being revised, often decolonised, to ensure all students feel included. This might also explain why assessments often include a reflective element, and why the notion of alignment between students’ needs, on the one hand, and assessments, ILOs and teaching, on the other, is so important (e.g. do not teach engineers how to write essays). Overall, it seems that students should have a genuine desire to communicate something for a task/assessment or classroom interaction to be authentic. This seems to apply to teachers too:
“one dimension of authenticity in teaching relates to educators’ care for the subject matter and thus engaging students in genuine dialogue around ideas that matter” (Kreber et al, 2007, p. 22)
The third dimension of authenticity, collaboration, suggests that the teaching context should encourage students to act as part of a community. In a narrow sense, here we’re looking at how students are interacting in the classroom among themselves in increasingly diverse groups but also with the teacher (some claim that students should be doing something rather than listening to someone). On this point, Cranton and Carusetta (2004, p.8) notice that
“it is only through relationships with others that authenticity can be fostered.”
In a broader sense, collaboration also encompasses the idea that students belong to various Communities of Practice whose practices educators should raise students’ awareness of (see also Academic Literacies).
How to apply this to our practice?
Reading about the various interpretations of authenticity has made it clear to me that fostering authenticity in teaching and learning should involve more than aligning curricula and assessments with the needs of professional settings. To move beyond this perhaps reductive explanation of authenticity, a Critical Pedagogy-informed approach might help. This educational approach highlights the importance of dialogue by framing teachers and students as “co-investigators” (Serrano et al, 2017, p. 12) which seems to fit well with the dimensions I have discussed in this post. It seems to me that one way of making our teaching more authentic is through student participation so that we can engage in a dialogue (i.e. collaboration) about whether we are meeting students’ needs (e.g., by providing an appropriate level of challenge) and the extent to which our teaching is shaping and being shaped by their identities.
What is your understanding of authenticity in teaching and learning? Would you add another dimension to the diagram? Please share your opinions by leaving a comment below!
References
Cranton, P. and Carusetta, E., 2004. Perspectives on authenticity in teaching. Adult Education Quarterly, 55(1), pp.5-22.
Kreber, C, Klampfleitner, M., McCune, V., Bayne, S. and Knottenbelt, M. 2007. What do you mean by “authentic”? A comparative review of the literature. Adult Education Quarterly, 58(1), pp.22-43.
Serrano, M.M., O’Brien, M., Roberts, K. and Whyte, D., 2018. Critical Pedagogy and assessment in higher education: The ideal of ‘authenticity’ in learning. Active Learning in Higher Education, 19(1), pp.9-21.
