Faculty with backgrounds in curriculum reform will be aware that pedagogical movements like authentic learning do not happen in a vacuum and they are rarely as novel as they claim to be. Often avant garde techniques have a propensity to recycle innovations from the past that were embraced with vigor decades ago, only to fade into obscurity. Examining his own field, the applied mathematician Jordan Ellenberg remarks that “every controversy in mathematics education has [happened]… before, multiple times, and everything we think of as new… is also old” (Ellenberg, 2021: 16). Ellenberg includes among recycled revolutions in mathematics instruction “child-centered” methods, replacing abstract examples with assignments possessing real life relevance and focusing on student-driven discovery rather than regurgitating solutions modeled by instructors.

Students of educational pedagogies will also know that calls for getting students out of the classroom and into the real world and celebrations of learning by doing are also not new. Consider the Waldorf schools, which reached the United States in 1919, or the earlier Montessori method, which arrived in 1912. Both movements stressed what today would be called experiential learning by doing. They aspired to be student-centered with a whole-child focus. They privileged individuality over standardized learning and they prefered self-discovery over instructor guidance.

Real-World, Student-Driven, Experiential Learning in Anthropological Ethnography

In my own field of sociocultural anthropology, something that is very much like authentic learning, is also at least a century old. In 1906, Elsie Clews Parsons remarked that “it is the universal experience of college instructors that text-book or lecture-imparted information is rarely assimilated.” Indeed, Parsons opined that “the college notebook is a kind of intellectual graveyard” (Parsons, 1906: ix). Although her later career would be spent in anthropology, Parsons’s doctoral degree was in pedagogy and she was well aware of broader movements to reform elementary education that predated the arrival of the Waldorf schools and Montessori method.

Parsons’s lament was that the reforms being introduced in elementary education were not being embraced in colleges. Universities were lagging behind. Before she discovered cultural anthropology, Parsons was assigned to teach social work at Barnard College. She decided to send her social work students out into “the field”– into the poorer neighborhoods of New York City– and have them visit client homes with a notebook and pen. Students were to make two visits per family each week, conducting what today we would call in-depth, semi-structured interviews and site visits. Back on campus, the students would gather to compare and discuss their notes and find new interest in Parsons’s lectures. We can say that Parsons re-invented what anthropologists were starting to call ethnographic fieldwork before she was aware of the existence of the nascent field of cultural anthropology.

Together with another New York anthropologist named Alexander Goldenweiser, Parsons mounted an effort to reform the teaching of anthropology by similarly emphasizing real world experience. But many of her colleagues were already on the same page. In 1898, Franz Boas abandoned the campus of Columbia University and moved his linguistics seminar to his kitchen table, where he presented a handful of students with raw texts from a dozen non-western languages. Their assignment was to “find the grammar” in languages entirely alien to their own. Most started his seminar with no prior knowledge of linguistics. One of Boas’s first doctoral students, Alfred Kroeber, recalled that the experience of “finding the grammar” was so challenging and riveting that he immediately abandoned his graduate studies in literature for anthropology (Kroeber, 1970).

A few decades later, Bronisław Malinowski, who immigrated to London from Poland, would remake British social anthropology by setting what he called the method of long term participant observation at the very center of the field. He expected his doctoral students to complete three years of fieldwork in a single community and most of them met that expectation. For the remainder of the twentieth century, sociocultural anthropologists embraced what can only be described as an authentic learning approach– at least to doctoral research.

Anthropologists came to talk about this long term, immersive, emergent, “discovery-by-doing” methodology as the ethnographic method (the singular tense is entirely misleading). Aspiring fieldworkers were required to go out into the real world, preferably somewhere totally unfamiliar to them, and solve practical problems, discover interesting questions, and invent appropriate methods in situ. Pre-doctoral preparation for fieldwork was minimal and seminars on methods were rare. Guidance amounted to pragmatic quips like “bring lots of socks.” It produced generations of practitioners distinguished by their resourcefulness and individuality.

In recent decades, the ethos and methods of ethnography have been adopted across the liberal and applied arts and sciences. I have visited with faculty in departments from engineering to literature who are assigning their students “real world” learning tasks that are not terribly different from those Elsie Clews Parsons assigned to her social work students in 1906– and for similar reasons. Alignment with prospects for employment aside, there are deep elective affinities between authentic learning and ethnography, which probably explains why ethnographic assignments have been so broadly and enthusiastically embraced by advocates of authentic learning.

You might be wondering: is there any difference between the Montesori method, or Malinowski’s fieldwork, and contemporary authentic learning? I think two differences stand out. First, neither anthropological fieldwork methods nor Montessori schools promoted their approach to learning based on potential vocational rewards. The contemporary emphasis on “career relevance” marks a departure. Secondly, while the early pioneers of authentic learning embraced these methods to cross social boundaries, contemporary movements instead highlight technological innovation.