What is authentic enquiry learning?

Imagine a university whose architecture students and staff design sustainable homes that are built, whose business and film schools’ students and staff work with a coastal local authority to produce a film promoting stronger shores, or whose law students overturn wrongful convictions, advise victims of domestic abuse, and assist a police force in exploring the impact of its domestic-abuse policies. Picture a university where students and academics from many disciplines partner with the National Trust at an English Baroque manor house to enhance its conservation work and tell its story through adaptive reuse, digital interpretation, animation and oral history.

What about a university at which these are not one-off projects but opportunities open to all students as part of their programme of study?

Facilitating teaching and research is too often seen as a balancing act between offering excellence in the student experience and outcomes for their future employability – and furthering the university’s research mission to create and disseminate knowledge. Perhaps, though, we shouldn’t be looking to balance these two as separate entities but instead offer a means of keeping teaching and research together through authentic enquiry-based learning. This pedagogy involves students working in teams (usually within one programme) to examine a specific real-world problem (usually related to their career aspirations).

Here, we propose a collaboration among students, academics and communities to co-construct knowledge and solutions.

Experiences and learning that address students’ employability and beyond

Employability has become a key political priority and so it is also a key concern for higher education institutions and agencies as well as for students themselves. It cannot be measured merely by initial employment and salary on graduation, though; it encompasses attributes and skills that can be transferred to situations beyond university study. These include intentional and self-aware career management, traits and dispositions (for example, openness to experience), discipline-specific skills, generic skills (such as teamwork and communication skills), and project-management and self-management skills.

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Evidence suggests that placements, extracurricular activities and work-integrated learning offer students the opportunities to develop these attributes and skills. However, these opportunities and their uptake (never widespread) are declining, particularly for those from socially disadvantaged or ethnic minority backgrounds.

Authentic enquiry learning provides an alternative means of developing these employability skills and attributes that can be open to all students. Moreover, authentic enquiry is a form of experiential learning that involves students and academics engaging collaboratively in meaningful, real-world activity to construct new knowledge and solutions that have value beyond their academic studies. Reflection on that process stimulates learning. It develops employability attributes precisely because successful solutions to problems require them. 

Authentic enquiry learning does not just offer the equivalent of, or alternative to, a work placement, however. Carefully selected projects necessitate both students and academics going beyond applying disciplinary knowledge and providing known solutions to known problems. Instead, university research-based enquiry stimulates a deeper approach to learning; it allows for the construction of original understanding of the phenomena under study. Deep learning encourages students, and academics, to transform theoretical knowledge into applied knowledge. It necessitates the development and use of such skills as critical thinking, application, integration, analysis and synthesis, and reflection upon this learning. 

Being focused on a real-world problem within a context that has meaning for students’ future empowers them to be active and reflective citizens and to develop their identity. Accordingly, this authentic enquiry process has potential to enhance students’ social mobility.

What’s in it for academics?

Such a pedagogic approach can also offer significant learning opportunities for academics.  The chance to go beyond the conventional dissemination of their knowledge, and to support students’ learning through a more exploratory, dialogical and participatory coaching model offers academics active engagement in discovery, contributing to their research activity while enhancing the quality of their teaching. It may also present further research opportunities, whether through the enquiry process itself or with the organisations or networks involved.

What’s in it for communities?

Authentic enquiry has potential beyond enhancing students’ employability or academics’ impact. Student and academics’ participation in their community strengthens the relationship between institutions and their local, national and global community, while the community receives valuable time and resource investment to examine issues they might otherwise not have the opportunity to undertake.

Arguably, authentic enquiry also offers potential for wider societal transformation. This can be achieved through recognising how developing students’ skills, academic knowledge, habits of enquiry, and critical curiosity can support them to recognise societal inequality and a need for change.

What are the challenges in implementing authentic enquiry learning?

Authentic enquiry comes with challenges. Academics’ identity may be contested as they are no longer the expert in the room working with what is known. Students’ identities might also be questioned as they become active knowledge creators rather than passive knowledge consumers.

As we cannot be sure what will arise during the learning process, authentic enquiry can be unnerving for both students and academics. This unpredictability may also present quality risks. How can academics be sure that individual students will learn what is intended, especially when they are working in teams? 

Finally, it must be acknowledged that live, real-world projects are significantly more time-consuming to set up and to maintain than conventional courses.

At Northumbria we have developed best practices for authentic enquiry. Successful initiatives have grown from a strategic decision to invest in these projects, starting with small-scale pilots. For example, our business clinic began 10 years ago with two academics and 24 students working on six projects. It now sees more than 400 students supported by a team of academics and professional support members, working on more than 100 projects annually. Our core guiding principles are that these activities should be credit-bearing and assessed. When universities embed authentic enquiry learning at the heart of their curricula, they demonstrate belief in their power to transform learning. We can only expect that adequate resources are devoted to enquiry projects when they are accorded sufficient value by institutions, their academics and students. It follows that assessment is key and we advise recognising that learning happens in authentic enquiry following reflection upon the experience. Therefore, this reflective process should form part of the assessment, perhaps alongside the product or output of the learning activity.

An experience open to all students

Projects of the type imagined at the start of this article already exist. Indeed, the ones listed are among hundreds brought to fruition at Northumbria University. Our vision for the future is to take the good practice in many of our programmes and make that offer to all students. Doing so will take investment in our staff, partnerships, students and infrastructure but forms part of our answer to the mission of the 21st-century university.

Jonny Hall is principal lecturer at Northumbria Law School, and Kate Black is professor of management learning and education and head of education at Newcastle Business School, both at Northumbria University.

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