6 Authentic Learning in a University Lab Group

Recently, your author had the opportunity to visit informally with several undergraduates who were part of what was rumored to be a particularly dynamic faculty lab group. We will keep the story anonymous. The students we talked to described several aspects of their lab that any teacher would be enthused about. They were incredibly excited and motivated about what they were doing and they were doing things that students rarely do. They took initiative and self-distributed tasks each week according to who was there and what needed to be done. They recognized that individually they brought different skill sets and different people could contribute in different ways. They decided what they needed to learn to contribute and they figured out how to learn it. They welcomed new students to the lab and helped them get up to speed. That probably sounds great! It gets even better.

As our conversation continued, the students noted that they worked harder in the lab than any of their “regular” courses. This was true even though they earned only one credit hour for the lab. As we unpacked that remarkable fact, an even more amazing discovery emerged: not only were they not fixated on grades or credit hours, they did not always enroll for credit at all. They wanted to participate and they were allowed to participate, whether or not they were enrolled. Surprised, we asked how many students were working in the lab without credit. They estimated that at any given time, about a quarter of the undergraduate students active in the lab were participating without earning any credit. They were learning off-transcript.

Pushing our amazement even further, they said that if a professor asked them to work as hard as they worked in the lab in any of their “regular” classes, they would drop. In effect, their regular classes belonged to a different social universe. In their regular classes, the workload was determined by faculty and student motivation was driven by earning grades. Students brought to those classes clear norms about reasonable workloads. A regular class was a well-defined, planned entity. The relationship between faculty and students was transactional and predictable. In contrast, the lab was not even an elective for most students, much less a requirement. And their workload was not decided by the faculty. It was self-imposed. All of this seemed to matter a great deal. Ponder that: one reason the lab worked so well was that faculty had retreated from a position of control. Absent faculty structuring, the students had risen to the challenge and taken charge of their learning. The fact that faculty were a nebulous presence seemed to play a big role in incentivising their efforts. Indeed, in retrospect, we noted that at no point during our interview did the students even mention their professors.

A final note. The students described what they did in their lab group as not only more “fun” and “social” than their regular classes, but also more “real” and “relevant” to their future. What does that mean? It might mean that they were familiar with tech narratives like the Navigator narrative. The way they worked in the lab seemed modeled on that story. In their lab, they were creating new technologies, they expected their work to have an impact, and they expected to reap rewards. It’s worth repeating that: they expressed confidence that what they were doing in the lab and how they were doing it was closer to their future work environments– closer to the real world– than any of their required courses. And they were confident that the work they were doing was consequential. The apparatus of higher education– grades, exams, lectures– was irrelevant to them.