Content area
Full Text
The term "authentic" refers to the genuine, real, and true. Authentic learning involves exploring the world around us, asking questions, identifying information resources, discovering connections, examining multiple perspectives, discussing ideas, and making informed decisions that have a real impact. An authentic learning environment is engaging for students because the content and context of learning are accepted by the student as relevant to his or her needs and deemed by the teacher as simulating life beyond the classroom.
Callison has suggested that information inquiry comes near authentic learning at the intersection of workplace information problems, personal information needs, and academic information problems or tasks.
State and national learning standards found today across disciplines often attempt to stress realworld applications. Students are asked to make academic connections to ordinary life experiences. Rather than surface-level, fact-based tasks, learners are asked to question, interpret, and apply information and ideas that have value in a larger social context. Many students aren't aware of how reading, writing, and mathematics are part of their daily life, and one of the challenges for educators is to help students make such real-world associations.
A specific challenge of the library media specialist is to partner with other teachers to design learning activities and develop assessments that resemble constructive experiences beyond the school. Partnering and simulating real-world situations are not easy tasks and usually fall short of any ideal implied in definitions of authentic learning. Examples and situations given here may help teams of educators to consider how to move closer to developing authentic learning environments. Moving away from heavy use of common worksheets and skill drills, multiple-choice exams, and a standard formula applied to all student research projects is an evolution toward authentic learning.
Teaching teams who engage in information inquiry are most likely to create authentic learning environments when they act as mentors or master-level teachers who model for their learning apprentices. They engage in inquiry with their students, not simply assign tasks. They raise questions, seek information, interpret findings and draw conclusions, and illustrate their inquiry practices as they work with students. They discuss openly for students to hear and see the inquiry process and results, and share both personal inquiry successes and failures. As Carol Tilley has written, cognitive apprenticeship becomes the...