Authenticity in Education |
WHAT IS AN AUTHENTIC EDUCATION
Education is defined as “the act or process of imparting or acquiring general knowledge, developing the powers of reasoning and judgment, and generally of preparing oneself or others intellectually for mature life”. An authentic education, therefore, is the bridge between the acquisition of knowledge and understanding. It provides the tools and atmosphere necessary for students to fully understand, connect, and apply the knowledge acquired in school to real world situations. Without these abilities students are left memorizing short term, testing, and repeating.
The Connection
The foundation for an authentic learning experience is found through the curriculum, which is based on "personalized learning, community-based learning, and project-based learning" in order to ensure the understanding of the topics and connections. This helps students connect learning objectives to real world situations as opposed to the typical cycle of memorization, testing, and forgetting.
Making connections between topics is a skill needed in everyday life because ‘real life’ is not compartmentalized into individual courses and classes. An authentic education will incorporate subjects and courses together in order to blend together understandings and begin to prepare students for life past school.
|
The Experience
Learning by experience provides evidence that the student has fully grasped the concepts and is able to connect them to real world situations. It helps students extend beyond connections in order to provide useful and relevant skills that can be applied to various situations outside the classroom. Simply put, experiential learning is learning by doing, rather than learning by being told.
Over twice the amount of students support experiential learning rather than learning in a traditional manner. Experiential learning suggests that student’s will be able to learn in other environments that the classroom cannot provide. It pushes students to learn and fully understand the topics, therefore allowing them to make connections by doing and applying.
The Application
In traditional education systems the application of knowledge is the least of worries. As long as students are able to memorize and test well, then their ability to connect the knowledge to other situations and apply it to make further discoveries is unnecessary. Students become bored in the classroom because of the lack of application of knowledge. Students are primarily focused on getting good grades, rather than acquiring the knowledge.
|
Through an authentic education these problems will be minimized, and hopefully, eliminated completely. Rather than testing, the level of student understanding will be assessed through projects, hands-on work, and experiments. Simply put, instead of grading and testing students irregardless of their understanding, as is now, their comprehension can be assessed and ensured through the application of knowledge and connections.
The Dispute
|
Though a problem in common education is obvious, the solution, of authentic education, tends to be overlooked. Education boards focus on the technical aspects of learning, such as lesson plans and papers, rather than the learning experience and knowledge application. Should the solution of a more authentic education become more commonplace it would provide students with a more current, useful, and easily applied education. This will further enrich the lives of students and broaden their intellectual range.
|