What is authentic about ‘authentic learning’?

“Authentic learning” is an appealing concept for many. It is often described as a pedagogical approach that emphasises learning by doing instead of just reading or listening, or solving real-world problems in ways that are relevant to students and their everyday lives and which perhaps cannot be sufficiently achieved inside a classroom. Authentic learning aims to provide experiences that are not contrived or artificial.

This approach may be well intended, but it is not neutral; it relies on value judgements. What counts as “authentic” is cultural and contextual, not objective or universal. The distinction matters for education because once a course, assessment or teaching style is deemed “authentic”, other legitimate approaches such as lectures, close reading or exam-based assessments are implicitly cast as less real or less valuable. That will have consequences as the terms feed into curriculum policies, teaching evaluations and beyond.

A quick review of the literature highlights key aspects that allegedly signify what is “authentic” about authentic learning. Among them are:

• Real-world relevance: Connecting students’ learning experiences to contexts, situations, challenges and complexities beyond the classroom. This aspect emphasises the practical application of knowledge and skills.
• Meaningful engagement: Exploring topics, ideas or questions that are personally relevant and interesting to students and connect learning to their lives. This aspect suggests that what is authentic is a sense of ownership and motivation to learn.
• Collaboration and interaction: Moving beyond the notion of the individual student striving alone to master (or at least memorise) information. This aspect puts students into “real world” situations with experts or practitioners in relevant fields, where collaborative problem-solving is more likely to be the norm.
• Authentic assessment: Assessing students in ways that reflect “real world” practices and allow them to demonstrate or apply knowledge and skills in new, meaningful ways. This aspect means supplementing or replacing tests and exams with assessments such as portfolios, presentations or projects.

These assumptions about authenticity underpin much of the teaching and learning that is project based, problem based, enquiry driven and experiential. Projects are treated as valuable because they approximate professional practice. Students are encouraged to pursue “meaningful” questions. Experiential activities, meanwhile, are embraced because they supposedly take students beyond the artificiality of the classroom.

But what makes any of these learning experiences more real or better than traditional methods?

As a cultural sociologist who has spent much of his career studying authenticity, I think it’s important to ask this question because the answer shapes real decisions: which courses get badged as innovative, which teaching gets rewarded in promotion and award cases, and which methods are treated as old-fashioned.

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Authentic learning started gaining traction in the 1990s. Other, sometimes competing, concepts and terms have shared similar principles. Experiential learning has emphasised learning through direct experience and reflection. It involves hands-on activities, field trips, internships and other experiences that allow students to apply their knowledge in real-world contexts. In problem-based learning and project-based learning, students often work in groups to investigate complex issues or challenges that require critical thinking, collaboration and problem-solving skills. Service learning combines community service with academic learning.

Are any of these pedagogical approaches more or less authentic than “authentic learning”? I don’t think so.

Common definitions link authenticity to originality, genuineness, realness and facts. People – academics as well as students, administrators, parents and others – often assume that authenticity can be simply and objectively defined. However, people use various cultural and situational criteria when deciding whether a phenomenon, person, object, event or practice is authentic, as research shows.

Different educators may have their own conceptions of what constitutes authentic learning based on diverse criteria, from disciplinary, epistemological and ontological stances to career paths for degree holders. Students, too, will have a variety of understandings and beliefs about what constitutes authentic learning, and those understandings are likely to also vary based on past experiences as well as by discipline.

In the same vein, what constitutes authentic learning in a philosophy course may be very different from a course in engineering. What seems authentic to a senior professor may feel contrived or unrealistic to a first-year undergraduate. Neither would be right or wrong if definitions of authentic learning were rooted in collective agreements. But if an organisation decides that a specific set of teaching or learning methods is authentic, other methods that are entirely appropriate in some disciplines or contexts may be unintentionally marginalised.

The potential problem with authentic learning, as I see it, is the use of the word “authentic”. Claiming that one thing is authentic seeds the idea that something else is inauthentic. If a committee decides that authentic learning is predicated on real-world interactions within practical settings, then suddenly classroom lectures and Socratic dialogues are at risk of becoming inauthentic contexts for learning. If authentic learning is defined in terms of students feeling engaged and motivated to learn, then topics that are not interesting to them become inauthentic. A project in which students consult for a non-profit organisation may involve real clients and issues or outcomes that everyone agrees are worthwhile, yet the deadlines, assessment criteria, team composition and other dimensions may still feel contrived or arbitrary. An engineering simulation may be fictional but represent or reproduce important disciplinary practices.

On the other side, putting students out in the “real world” does not automatically produce good learning.

Descriptive terms such as “experiential learning”, “problem-based learning” or “service learning” are, in my opinion, more useful than normative terms such as “authentic learning”. After all, who should ultimately decide what counts as an authentic project, an authentic problem or an authentic learning experience? Descriptive terms can better emphasise teaching goals or objectives without placing some teaching practices on a pedestal. The important question is what kinds of experiences an activity is designed to produce, what practices it allows students to participate in, whose definitions of “best” or “relevant” it privileges, and how such experiences contribute to intended learning outcomes. 

Educational transformation always involves choices about what kinds of knowledge, practice and experience matter. Those choices should be made and labelled carefully because their effects will apply across disciplines. Educators may be better off using terms that describe what they are trying to produce – closer contact with practitioners, more first-hand data collection, assessments that mirror real workplace tasks – instead of lumping them all under “authentic”. When designing new ways of teaching and learning, they can ask whose definition of relevance is being used and how the activity supports the intended learning outcomes. Those questions are more useful than deciding whether learning is simply authentic or inauthentic.

J. Patrick Williams is associate professor of sociology at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He is co-editor, with Phillip Vannini, of Authenticity in Culture, Self and Society (Routledge, 2009) and, with Kaylan C. Schwarz, of Studies on the Social Construction of Identity and Authenticity (Routledge, 2021).

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