1 Introduction

NOTE: This short OER text was produced to support a faculty development course about authentic learning at Boise State University (and beyond).

Anyone who spends significant time among teaching faculty will notice a hesitancy, often hidden by superficial avowals of enthusiasm, whenever “new” pedagogies are presented. A gap opens up between displays of interest and private doubts. You might have experienced this and felt pressure to feign more support than you actually have. You might quietly hope that this too will pass without distracting you too much from existing teaching strategies that work for you.

Your soft skepticism might be driven by missing details that leave you uncertain about what you are being asked to do. Past experiences might be important too. On one end of the spectrum, you can probably point to positive, durable improvements, and at the other end to minor disasters. In between, there are no doubt many methods you experimented with that had no discernible or durable impact, for good or ill, save for the time you invested. So it is reasonable for you to have questions: Will the new approach deliver on its promises? Is it just the latest flavor of the month, destined to be forgotten a few semesters down the road? Is it really worth the time and risk involved? What does it require to get started?

This short discussion of authentic learning provided in this Pressbook will offer answers to these basic questions. It is shared with you on the assumption that the reservations veteran teaching faculty bring to new methods are often well grounded. As someone who has practiced authentic learning for about a decade, I think there is reason for caution. Authentic learning requires a shift in mindset and method that isn’t a good fit for all courses or all assignments. But where it fits, it can deliver large rewards. Both the risks and the rewards, however, involve factors you often cannot control. And that’s the key point: teaching authentic learning assignments is like fielding a sports team. There are methods you can use to train your team and prepare. There are strategies that can increase your chances of winning. But things can also go wrong– for individual students and for entire classes, and, to follow the metaphor, for entire seasons. Incredibly positive and exhilarating semesters can be followed by semesters where even Murphy’s Law proves overly optimistic, and even the things that cannot possible go wrong manage to go wrong.

As it turns out, the key to making authentic learning work is embracing the risk and uncertainty it produces. To make it work, you need to simultaneously cede control, reduce structure,  de-risk assignments, enlarge your reservoir of trust, and practice radical forgiveness, for yourself and for your students. They will fail, and you will fail. As you learn to de-risk the gambles you are asking students to take – gambles that will make them hesitant for the same reason they give you pause – you may also grow more comfortable with the idea of abandoning structured assignments and instructor defined assessments. You may learn to give up trying to control student activities and lean more toward minimizing the structural constraints you impose. You may learn to minimize your visibility and step out of the way. But even though teaching changes dramatically, it does not cease when student work is self-generated and self-guided. You will learn how to be there in new ways, when you are no longer the center of attention or the voice of authority.