Is “authenticity” just another weasel word in education?

Spending so much time in dementia centres, hospitals, and hospices is allowing me new insight into how little I understand the life experience of others.

It makes me wonder about our claims to authenticity in schools - When the participants in our so called “authentic learning experience” cannot vote with their feet, and our own middleclass professional life experience as teachers is so limited, will we ever do more than pretend to authenticity in school?

One of the ironies of our claim to providing authentic contexts through inquiry learning is our lack of life knowledge about anything that comes close to authentic work place experience for the majority of adults who play in contexts outside of school.

The career path primer of too many of us reads:  Middleclass childhood life experiences punctuated by institutional interludes of Pre-School>Primary School>Secondary School> followed by Tertiary School> Professional Teacher Education> The classroom.   

Any working experience we can claim as outside of the classroom is holiday work, a year out to earn money for tertiary study fees, an unfortunate career launch into XXXX which we fled after eighteen months etc.

Our life work experience in school, our ” timetabled by the bell” working day, our school term calendar, our comfortable middleclass salaries, our lack of accountability for student learning outcomes and our overlong summer holidays remain distant and dislocated from the authenticity of others lives –

Lifelong learning for educators means living a surreal lifestyle where despite  exhortations of ”sharing” and facilitating” we always hold institutional power over learners, we never escape the age sorted classroom, we endure regular “principal on the podium” group think assemblies ….. And we never resolve, we just never resolve the ”ever important in school” Gedanken thought experiment of “What can we do about the litter in the playground?”.

Generalisation I know, but I am wondering if this very limited experience of other lives, limits our ability to teach in a way that will ever provide "authentic contexts" for our students' learning.

I worry that as a teacher I will never have a  “He is going to show them how a professional does it.” - “Smokey the Bear heads into the autumn woods with a red can of gasoline and a box of wooden matches.” Billy Collins moment.  [Unless of course we are charged with teaching the middle classes how to be school teachers or tertiary lecturers - then I'll be right "ontoit"]

All this thinking reminds me of Ricardo Semler’s Lumiar School.  I want to understand why teachers were so easily omitted in building a new way of doing school.

Education without compulsion... The man who believes in managing without managers wants to teach without teachers. His Lumiar primary school in Sao Paulo uses tutors and 'masters' instead. The masters are architects, astronomers, painters, musicians real experts chosen by the students themselves to come for weeks at a time. It sort of helps if they are not teachers. The thinking is that children want to learn and that ordinary schools stop them.  Dateline June 15 2005

And this thinking interested me in the descriptions of “authentic learning” provided at the New York City Food and Finance High School

“Food and Finance High School, the first New York City high school dedicated to the food business. The school is an experiment in the city’s efforts to create more small schools and is part of the national movement to elevate culinary training.

At Food and Finance High School, food is woven into every aspect of the academic load. English classes use books like “Fast Food Nation” by Eric Schlosser and “My Year of Meats” by Ruth L. Ozeki. On a recent afternoon students were reading a profile of Dave Thomas, the founder of Wendy’s.

They learn math by measuring ingredients for a cake or by writing a business plan for a restaurant. They can earn science credits by raising bok choy hydroponically and tending to tanks of tilapia designed by a scientist from the Cornell University Cooperative Extension.” The Teacher Ate My Homework Kim Severson New York Times April 11, 2007 

If only the NY City students could link up with Selena Chan in Christchurch, who blogs about m-learning in the hospitality industry - Check out - Impact of technology on future skill needs: Mobile phones and workplace assessment by the Industry Training Federation (ITF). 

But then I began to worry about the whole notion of valuing “authenticity “ in an “unfixed social world”, a world where we can ask

"What…if the maze were made of partitions on castors, if the walls changed their position fast, perhaps faster yet than the rats could scurry in search of food, and if the tasty rewards were moved as well, and quickly, and if the targets of the search tended to lose their attraction well before the rats could reach them, while other similarly short-lived allurements diverted their attention and drew away their desire? " (Bauman p.21 cited in McWilliam 2007 Unlearning how to teach )

Is our desire for authenticity and Smokey’s “show them how a professional does it” thinking” dangerously fixed in the unfixed future world of the 21st Century Learner?

Flames
By Billy Collins

Smokey the Bear heads
into the autumn woods
with a red can of gasoline
and a box of wooden matches.

His ranger's hat is cocked
at a disturbing angle.

His brown fur gleams
under the high sun
as his paws, the size
of catcher's mitts,
crackle into the distance.

He is sick of dispensing
warnings to the careless,
the half-wit camper,
the dumbbell hiker.

He is going to show them
how a professional does it.