Introduction

Research on authentic learning has been one of the most exciting and prolific areas in education over the past several decades. In particular, it was a cornerstone of the formation of the learning sciences, heavily influenced by situative perspectives that called into question the relationship between classroom cultures and professional or expert practice (Hod & Sagy, 2019). Brown et al. (1989) explained that “too often the practices of contemporary schooling deny students the chance to engage the relevant domain culture, because that culture is not in evidence” (p. 34). In response to this gap, numerous studies across a range of educational fields or areas of research have sought to create authentic learning environments in classrooms, through simulation-based learning (for a recent review, see Chernikova et al., 2020), context-based learning (e.g., Prins et al., 2018; van Vorst & Aydogmus, 2021), and learning in out-of-school labs (e.g., Mierwald et al., 2022; Nachtigall & Rummel, 2021; Stamer et al., 2021). Knowledge building communities (KBCs) — a pioneering approach to designing technology-enhanced, student-driven inquiry environments (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1991) — have been a leader in this direction, amassing substantial research evidence that demonstrates how students can engage in authentic knowledge processes to address real-world challenges (Chen & Hong, 2016).

While the above sociocultural conceptualization of authentic learning emphasizes mirroring the real world (i.e., the world of knowledge domains and practices), our research integrates a complementary humanistic perspective that emphasizes mirroring the whole person (i.e., the learner’s world of self). Specifically, this approach contends that the relationship between what a person thinks and feels internally and what they communicate outwardly should be congruent with one another. When they are, a person can be considered authentic in that they are integrated, or engaged in activities that allow them to liberally pursue their passions, (relatively) free of cultural constraints or influences (Bohart, 2013; Rogers, 1969).

In recent years, there has been a growing implicit understanding of the importance of combining sociocultural and humanistic perspectives of authenticity. For example, the connected learning approach (Ito et al., 2010/2019) has sought to bridge professional or expert practices with school learning, all the while making schools relevant to students’ personal interests, identities, and communities (Peppler et al., 2023). However, approaches like this have not brought these perspectives together explicitly in theory nor to guide the designs of classroom environments. In the present research, we take these complementary perspectives to see how they can support learning. To do this, we have enacted a number of variations of these doubly authentic designs to investigate how learners engage in knowledge building when their personal interests and identities are attended to. The analysis of our data, instantiated across multiple case studies using a grounded analysis approach, resulted in an interest-identity-domain configuration framework that can be used to elucidate different ways that learners’ engagement could be supported during doubly authentic inquiry.

Interests and identity in doubly authentic learning environments

There are both sociocultural and humanistic rationales for why students’ interests and identities can and should be explored within authentic learning environments. In the following sections, we elaborate on each of these perspectives to show how they are complementary.

Sociocultural views of authentic learning

Sociocultural views of learning take people’s social and cultural history, values, and goals into consideration to understand engagement with an interest (Azevedo, 2018). These perspectives emphasize social interaction and particularly the ways that inter-mental processes support intra-mental development (Vygotsky, 1978). Research in this area has focused on the way lifelong, life-wide, and life-deep (and also life-wise: Kwek et al., 2017) experiences are distributed and cross-contextual (Banks et al., 2007), raising tensions between the different contexts that people participate in that might raise and (dis)encourage interest development and continuity (Akkerman & Bakker, 2019). It also suggests that value systems and social practices with one’s everyday life require coordination (Bell et al., 2012).

While research taking these perspectives have put significant efforts into exploring interests and identities in informal learning (Nasir & Hand, 2008; Ito et al., 2010/2019), many scholars have been interested in the ways schools and classrooms can use this knowledge to better design their learning environments. Specifically, the idea of authentic learning was proposed several decades ago to create a better match between what and how students learn in classrooms with what exists in the real-world (Brown et al., 1989; Edelson & Reiser, 2006).

The idea of designing learning environments that are authentic is rooted in sociocultural perspectives because they try to give students access to a particular set of intended practices so that the students can enculturate these cultural products (Hod & Sagy, 2022). This broadens the view of classroom learning from one where the goal is knowledge acquisition, to a more holistic approach that seeks to transform students’ identities as they come to increasingly participate in the ways of knowing, doing, and being of the disciplinary culture being learned (Herrenkohl & Mertl, 2010; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Sfard, 1998).

Knowledge Building Communities (KBCs) have been one of the pioneers in this perspective, seeking to foster students’ participation in knowledge building culture. KBCs take decidedly sociocultural views of learning because they try to bridge the gap between the ways classrooms are designed and knowledge building cultures function. For example, classroom KBCs are built on the premise that collective cognitive responsibility must be taken by students in communities to advance their knowledge (Scardamalia, 2002). Doing this involves having community members develop awareness of others’ contributions, similar to the way researchers must stay up to date on the current state of knowledge. Moreover, it involves making complementary contributions, so that the relation between existing knowledge and the new knowledge that is advanced is made explicit. This is akin to the way researchers may refute or extend the ideas of their predecessors. Lastly, taking collective cognitive responsibility suggests distributed engagement, whereby all members of the community investigate topics that they deem are important to advance the field. This is similar to the way the scientific community, such as biologists, may have some researchers examining cells, others proteins, and yet others different mechanisms all within the same discipline and towards similar goals (Zhang et al., 2009).

Humanistic views of authentic learning

In contrast to the sociocultural view of authenticity that KBCs have embodied, humanistic psychologists have offered a person-centered view of authenticity that is rooted in the relation between what a person communicates outwardly and what they feel inside. This perspective emphasizes the need for individuals to live authentic lives where there is congruence between their inner resources and outer actions. Through a process in which people are trusted to value their own experiences without being threatened by the introjection of external beliefs, people can make choices based on what they deem best for their growth (Cooper et al., 2013). Therefore, learning environments should be curiosity-driven, based on what learners need and want to know so they can fulfill their actualizing tendencies (Rogers, 1969), facilitated by the freedom given to them to express their identities (Rahmian & Hod, 2021).

The person-centered perspective was pioneered by Carl Rogers, who revolutionized the field of psychology by proposing that it is the active client who leads to therapeutic change, rather than the therapist. This led to a shift from seeing therapy as a way to cure clients to a broader, more positive outlook that aimed for personal growth and can be applied to every living human being (Yalom & Leszcz, 2020). The emphasis on growth is part of the reason that Rogers’ person-centered ideas have been so applicable to education (Rogers, 1969) and have shown very strong effects across a number of important intellectual and social dimensions of schooling (Cornelius-White & Harbaugh, 2010).

One key practical facet of humanistic education that Rogers laid out is a set of necessary but sufficient conditions for personal growth and development (Rogers, 1969). Specifically, teachers or facilitators are responsible to build a classroom culture where unconditional positive regard, empathic listening, and congruence are present (Rogers, 1967). Unconditional positive regard requires accepting others as worthy, free of our judgements or devaluations. Empathy requires listening with care to more than just the text of what a person says, but to the non-verbal cues and feelings that underlie the messages that people convey. Congruence is the matching between people’s inner experience, awareness, and what they communicate. In educational settings, students and teachers often wear “masks” as they play culturally prescribed roles. Acting congruently involves being genuine in relationships and being sensitive to the moment-to-moment feelings that are constituted within any situation.

There exist numerous methods to integrate these principles into educational practices, which are frequently contingent upon situational variables. Factors such as the pedagogical expertise of educators in cultivating humanistic environments, the specific age demographic of the learners, and the objectives of the curriculum significantly shape the implementation of humanistic educational activities. Hod and Ben-Zvi (2018) propose a paradigmatic model in which educators possess extensive training and proficiency in these methodologies, the learners are adults with the maturity and life experiences conducive to profound self-reflection, and the emphasis on exploring individual and collective identities aligns seamlessly with the educational objectives. Within these diverse educational settings, termed Humanistic Knowledge Building Communities (HKBCs), approximately half of the instructional time is devoted to promoting person-centered objectives, while the remainder concentrates on idea-centric learning. Irrespective of the particular design, educational environments that are rooted in these humanistic values endow students with an intrinsic locus of evaluations. This approach enables them to participate in activities that hold significant relevance to their personal experiences, transcending the various communities they are part of (Banks et al., 2007).

Combining approaches to authenticity to attend to students’ interests and identities across domains of learning

There are several lines of research that have, often implicitly, taken both the sociocultural and humanistic views of authenticity into account. For example, Hidi & Renninger (2006) conceptualized interest development as spanning lifelong and life-wide engagement, that moves from situational interests to more developed and internally based individual interests (Azevedo, 2018). More recently, Renninger & Hidi (2021) emphasized the importance of self-related information processing in which individuals connect knowledge to their selves. This line of work appears to draw on sociocultural authenticity in the sense that it attends to the real-world communities in which people engage, while also humanistic authenticity by connecting to people’s unique, personal interests. Along these lines, Nasir and Hand (2008) point out that scholarship on identity is often divided by those which view identity as “interactionally constructed and shifts in relation to the social setting and actors” (p. 147) versus perspectives that attend to people’s identity being global and relatively fixed. Thus, they are dealing with a similar tension between a person’s identity being related to their authentic belonging in changing settings or communities vis-à-vis their being authentic to some inner identity. These different tensions have been noted by other scholars, too (Gee, 2000; Hand & Gresalfi, 2015).

One approach along these lines that is interested in the design of schooling is connected learning. Connected learning deals with the challenge of how students participate in many communities as part of the long arc of their personal growth and development (Ito et al., 2010/2019; 2020). To do so, connected learning examines the intersection of interests, opportunities, and relationships. Interests are defined as people’s engagement with hobbies, sports, academics, artistic areas, and political and civic activities. Relationships include the support of mentors, caregivers, educators and peers that are joint participants in learning environments, with a focus on the significant role they play in legitimizing interests and brokering connections to opportunities across settings. Opportunities are the connections and practices that help young people find their way to success in the wider world, which includes academic, career, civic, and political dimensions. Therefore, designers taking this approach create learning environments that “embody values of equity, social belonging, and participation in order to expand opportunity for diverse youth” (Ito et al., 2020, p. 6). Learning and development from this lens are understood as a continual process of learning pathways formation that connect and shape interests and identities which happens across contexts and over time (Banks et al., 2007; Bell, et al., 2012; Ito & Martin, 2013).

Our approach to support transformative learning in ways that address students’ identities and interests draws explicitly on sociocultural and humanistic views of authenticity by foregrounding this duality. In our view, interests and identities are two closely related notions that, together, can potently explain students’ past, present, and future lives as they pertain to their classroom activities. We define identity as stories about a person’s practices and belongingness to particular groups based on ritualized forms of practice, all expressed in discourse (Sfard & Prusak, 2005). Identities, therefore, are the collection of stories told about people (in the first, second, or third person) that are reified, significant, and endorsed. For example, a person may be talked about as working hard once or repeatedly. As these practices become more consistent over time, stories about this person slowly transform into objects, such as when that person becomes known as a “hard worker” (Heyd-Metzuyanim & Sfard, 2012). This continuum between one-time, situational practices and those that cross contexts captures the fact that identities are somewhat malleable and stable at the same time (Hod & Dvir, 2022). These identity stories span past experiences, present practices, and future (designated) goals, too (Sfard & Prusak, 2005). For example, a person may have the designated identity of wanting to become a doctor. Interests, which intersect with the notion of identities, are usually framed through these types of future orientations. Specifically, we view interests as being defined through discourse, typically through terms that express enthusiasm, curiosity, or motivation such as “want to, ought to, can and cannot be.” In relation to identities, which are more about practices and belonging, interests relate to particular topics, objects, or events. Interests are triggered or sustained (Azevedo, 2018; Hidi & Renninger, 2006), depend on the individual’s needs and goals (Hofer, 2010), and are perceived as valuable objects for present or future life (Krapp, 2005; Renninger & Hidi, 2021).

Based on these definitions, a well-designed classroom should attend to interests and identities in two ways. First, it should give students opportunities to engage in the ways of knowing, doing, and being of real-world knowledge builders, by allowing students to inquire into relevant topics within a domain. While the domain sets some constraints around these topics — as students need to connect and build on the existing knowledge base (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1994) — there remains a wide latitude for students to act with epistemic agency and find their own area of expertise within the KBC (Scardamalia, 2002). Stated differently, sociocultural perspectives of authenticity have to do with aligning individual and collective interests and identities. The second facet of a well-designed classroom should use humanistic concepts and methods to draw on and explore students’ interests and identities as part of their inquiry, so they can be congruent. Together, we refer to these classrooms as “doubly authentic designs” because they combine the authenticity of engaging students in inquiry that gives students access to real-world practices with the authenticity of allowing them to jointly explore their interests and identities in the pursuit of personal growth and development (Yalom & Leszcz, 2020).

To inform an educational practice that takes these views into account, we have drawn on KBCs as a paragon of the sociocultural perspective and person-centered instructionFootnote 1 (Cornelius-White & Harbaugh, 2010) as a paragon of the humanistic perspective. Joining these practices is important because each on their own attends to different types of authenticity. For example, research, to date, on KBCs has focused on progressive idea-advancement (Scardamalia, 2002), giving less attention to the people, their personal goals and experiences, and the socioemotional aspects of forming and becoming part of a community (Cohen & Hod, 2021). Yet, fostering deep and lasting involvement in knowledge building is inherently tied to the lives of the participants, including the relationships they develop with their peers and the type of social norms they contribute to. These non-epistemic commitments are under-theorized in KBCs, and in practice they are only passively attended to (Chen & Hong, 2016), resulting in classroom cultures that might be authentic to the disciplinary practices and modern professional demands, but are not fully experienced as (humanistically) authentic by the students. A significant challenge in KBC scholarship remains to better understand how the knowledge building process and the identities of the participants are interrelated and how both can be concurrently fostered in doubly authentic designs.

Similarly, research on person-centered education has not included the idea-centered goals that knowledge building makes explicit. While person-centered education does deal with having students learn content areas, there are no examples of research taking sociocultural approaches that apply knowledge building principles such as collective cognitive responsibility, improvable ideas, and democratizing knowledge (Scardamalia, 2002). Therefore, HKBCs have been developed as a way to combine these approaches (Hod & Ben-Zvi, 2018). The intended culture of HKBCs is doubly authentic in that it fosters the norms, practices, and values of authentic disciplinary KBCs and person-centeredness (Hod & Katz, 2020). Idea-centered activities (e.g., collaboratively investigating a topic) introduce students to the KBC culture, while person-centered activities introduce students to humanistic values. However, it is the integration of both types of activities that is most consequential, as students concurrently learn how to advance ideas together, who they are as knowledge builders, and how their participation is experienced by others. Fostering the Rogerian conditions makes the community a safe place to reflect on and try out new ways to build knowledge. These transformations can support more productive collaboration, further propelling the joint idea advancement, and so forth. The doubly authentic culture can therefore facilitate greater idea and identity advancement compared with either culture by itself.

Building on efforts to combine these approaches, our research seeks to examine how learners engage in inquiry when they participate in doubly authentic designs. It is imperative to note that the intent of this study is not to compare and contrast the outcomes from these varied learning environments. Instead, the objective is to transcend these settings, endeavoring to elucidate the mechanisms of learning in these distinctively specialized contexts. Therefore, we ask the following questions: In what ways do students connect between their interests and identities within the domain of inquiry in variations of doubly authentic learning environments? How do these connections relate to the depth and sustainability of their learning?

Methods

Our research is being carried out within a design-based research framework (Collins, 1992). DBR is a method inspired by a sociocultural view that sees learning as a situated activity distributed across complex environments comprising individuals, communities, and tools (Brown et al., 1989). Therefore, learning environments should be evaluated in situ. It is distinctive from experiments that are conducted in laboratories or other controlled environments by relying on data extracted from real-world contexts. Its analytic methods have the dual focus of overcoming real-world challenges and advancing abstract theories (McKenney & Reeves, 2018). It aims to develop new settings that support what education can and should be, what is possible rather than actual (Bakker, 2018). Joining this DBR project allowed us to explore our research questions with an eye on bringing humanistic and sociocultural perspectives together to support learning.

Within our ongoing effort to progressively refine the design of doubly authentic learning environments, we applied a multiple case study approach to answer our research questions (Stake, 2006; Yin, 2009). Multiple case study approaches involve examining two or more settings that share some common characteristics, with the goal of generating a theoretical explanation about how some phenomenon happens. The method is typically used in education to examine complex settings, such as the classrooms. By comparing and contrasting the way learning happens across multiple settings, insights with potential generalizability can be gleaned that can then be tested in future research.

Research participants and setting

The data collection and analysis processes that we engaged in to do this research were extensive in their breadth and depth. The research settings included three different doubly authentic learning environments taught at elementary, middle, and tertiary settings across two countries. Each of these settings attended to KBCs and humanistic designs, but with different emphases depending on the context. All three settings engaged students in the authentic knowledge building practices of practitioners or experts, while supporting students in exploring their identities. The conceptual grounds for this research were developed as part of our active, international collaboration across these settings over multiple years.

The elementary school setting that we researched was located in Albany, New York, where we focused on a fifth grade classroom with 23 students (Yuan et al., 2022). The specific classroom was chosen based on the experience of a teacher who had shown high command of the KBC approach in past years when she was involved in a related research program. She was supported by a co-design team composed of the present researchers (and several others). Students in this class studied ecology, human body systems, and water as part of the science curriculum that lasted the entire year using a light variation of the doubly authentic approach, given that the teachers’ training was in KBCs and not HKBCs. Mostly, the humanistic activities that were supplemented came in the form of researchers who played the role of teacher assistants, working individually and continuously with students to better understand their own identities and interests and how these related to their inquiries. Other additions were run by the teacher. For example, the teacher assigned students to discuss and write about their “journeys of thinking.” This process afforded the students an opportunity for introspection regarding their individual inquiries, prompting them to reassess the reasons behind their chosen topics of study and to contemplate any potential modifications they might wish to implement. The teacher also implemented meta-cognitive meetings, whereby each of the students shared their own inquiry areas in a public forum with the classroom community. This approach not only facilitated exposure to novel ideas, potentially sparking newfound interests among students, but it also created a platform for students to be acknowledged and listened to by their peers. Consequently, the public disclosure of their inquiry topics served as an act of identity formation, as it associated students with specific intellectual domains. For this study, we focused on the human body systems unit, which lasted from January 2018 to the end of April 2018. We chose this section because it gave students the opportunity to become familiar with the pedagogy during the first unit (ecology), allowing us to examine more mature forms of student inquiry.

The middle-school setting that we examined took place in a public school in Northern Israel. We worked closely with a history teacher to help her implement a more advanced version of the doubly authentic design (compared with the elementary school setting) as a pilot study that became a longer-term research-practice partnership (Coburn & Penuel, 2016) with the school in the following years. As part of the humanistic activities, the students participated in several structured social interactions aimed at deepening their mutual acquaintances. These sessions required them to discuss their interests and hobbies, particularly with peers they were less familiar with. Additionally, specialized activities were designed and implemented to help build norms of active and empathic listening. The students were also tasked with maintaining online reflective journals (open to the rest of the community), in which they pondered over the learning process, articulated their reasons for selecting specific inquiry topics, and examined the connection of these topics to their personal identities. Furthermore, they participated in regular collective reflection sessions, offering a communal space to evaluate their activities within the community and to contemplate future directions. Thirty students in this history class studied the topic of revolutions throughout most of the school year (November to April). While the topic was already part of their curriculum in previous years, we worked with the teacher to re-organize all classroom activities (and content) so that students could experience building knowledge as a community (KBC) while reflecting on their experiences, identities, and relationships at the same time.

Finally, the tertiary settings that we examined included one bachelor’s (BA) and one master’s (MA) level course within the Faculty of Education at the University of Haifa. Both of these courses were part of studies that aimed to understand and refine the HKBC model (Hod & Ben-Zvi, 2018) and in general were very advanced forms of HKBCs. One key aspect of the humanistic activities included intensive group reflection sessions where students explored their own identities by examining their interpersonal relationships in the here-and-now of the group. For example, the groups were tasked with “removing their masks” and talking authentically about who they were and how others saw them. Students were also asked to maintain online reflective diaries. As part of this ongoing assignment, they were required to read and comment on their peers’ diaries, creating an environment where everyone’s identity was more exposed than typical. These types of activities were connected to their inquiry in explicit ways. For example, during an interest mapping activity, students were asked to draw the connections between their identities, interests, and inquiry topics before sharing them for feedback with their peers. The BA course included 30 pre-service teachers who were studying the topic of climate change using the doubly authentic design. The MA course included 17 students from the Educational Technologies Graduate Program. In this course, students studied the theoretical foundations of the field. As part of their learning process, they worked collectively to inquire about theories of learning as they engaged in intensive, reflective group activities led by an experienced moderator.

Data collection and analysis

To create a rich account of learning from the various cases studied, we collected extensive data from several sources that spanned both types of authenticity. Data collected included the knowledge-based advances made by students alongside information about their interests and identities. We therefore collected (1) audio and video recordings of face-to-face meetings complemented by field observations; (2) physical and online artifacts, particularly those posted in online learning platforms (e.g., The Knowledge Forum (KF); Scardamalia, 2004) by students; and (3) open interviews at opportune times, when something interesting occurred as related to our research questions, or at fixed times (e.g., at the end of the unit). We note that for reasons having to do with ethical compliance (in accordance with the appropriate ethical review board), we were only able to record field observations in the middle school setting and had to forgo audio and visual recordings there.

Given that we collected extensive data from selected instantiations of our pedagogical model within a longer-term design-based research effort, our analysis process was not linear. The ideas that we developed and presented as part of the background of this paper, as well as the findings, emerged through a back and forth process between our case studies using the constant-comparative technique (Corbin & Strauss, 2015). After making insights from our observations and analysis in one setting, we applied them to the other, and so forth, until our ideas became clear. Ultimately, we can describe our analysis process as consisting of four general stages, roughly in line with Charmaz’ (2008) grounded analysis approach. The first stage primarily involved examining the MA course, where we laid out some of the initial ideas about interests and identities, largely influenced by Hidi & Renninger (2006). This involved writing up deep case studies of two students to help us operationalize how we distinguished between situational (initial and triggered) and individual interests. The second stage involved applying these ideas and researching them in the elementary school in Albany, where the ideas started to coalesce as we tested these ideas in the field and broadened them based on different learning phenomena that we observed. For example, we started to recognize student archetypes that did not fit the preliminary ideas that we already developed. During the third stage, we continued to test out these ideas, but much more intentionally with the middle school and undergraduate students. Likewise, we continued to examine the accumulated data across our focal settings. This is where the first version of the complete framework that we present as part of the findings in this paper emerged, which identified all the main components of the phenomena we were attending to. Lastly, we returned to all our data corpuses to refine the framework and empirically validate it. This involved working as an analysis team to engage in a systematic inquiry of students in our corpus that took all of the data sources into consideration. For this research, we specifically report on our analysis from the full group of students from the elementary school setting, supplemented with illustrative case studies from the other contexts that shed light on the nuances of the grounded framework.

Findings

The major outcome of our research, which we report on first for clarity (even though it emerged in the latter stages of the data analysis), is represented in a two-by-two interest-identity-domain configuration framework (ENDURE). Our findings are therefore divided into four corresponding subsections, one for each quadrant of the representation (Fig. 1). In the following subsections, we elaborate on what the configuration means before demonstrating it based on our analysis of a full classroom of elementary school students who studied a unit on human body systems.

Fig. 1
figure 1

Four configurations in ENDURE

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The vertical axis of ENDURE represents the relation between a student’s identity and the domain being studied. A students’ identity can be isolated or connected to the domain. An isolated identity means that students find it hard to connect their identities to the domain. A connected identity contains an inquiry question that connects the learners’ identity to the domain. The horizontal axis represents whether students’ inquiry questions are based on their identity or the domain. Inquiry questions that are domain-based are typical in the curriculum or field, whereas those that are identity-based often have deep, personal connections that are motivated by students’ interests.

As is detailed in the sections below, we found four different types of indicators cutting across and relevant to each of the four configurations (purpose, integration, persistence, depth). While we did not necessarily find all indicators for each student within a configuration, we determined their classification based on the preponderance of indicators. Likewise, while most cases are consistent, there are situations where students exhibited indicators from multiple configurations and which may have changed over time. The 12 indicators are listed in Table 1 and referenced in the examples within the subsections that follow. In total, we found five with disengaged configurations, eight who were triggered, zero imposed, five natural, and five with insufficient data to make a determination. We provide illustrative examples from each type.Footnote 2

Table 1 List of indicators across identity-interest-domain configurations
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Disengaged configuration

The disengaged configuration describes situations where learners have trouble finding a meaningful purpose for their inquiry in a way that connects their identities to the domain. This is reflected in the first two indicators, which explain why students remain disengaged: Their rationale for inquiring is not unclear, and the connections they make between their inquiry and identity remain undeveloped. As a result, the questions they ask are typical or general to the domain. Likewise, inquiry in this configuration is generally shallow (or sometimes not in evidence at all), whereby students may follow their friends or jump between topics without making connections between them. Table 2 describes students from the elementary school classroom whom we found had a disengaged configuration. In the case of Ethan, his disengaged configuration transitioned to a different one after he heard about a different topic of inquiry from his peers.

Table 2 Students who demonstrated a disengaged configuration
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The disengaged configuration is particularly pertinent in light of the low levels of student engagement in K-12 schools across the USA (Busteed, 2013) and the rest of the world. This configuration sheds light on why this may happen, which has to do with students having difficulty connecting their identities to their research questions within a domain. Now with the ability to understand why this happens, students like Beatriz — who was able to briefly connect her identity with the domain, yet was not encouraged to continue elaborating on it — can be better supported.

Triggered configuration

The triggered configuration, whose title is appropriated from existing literature on interests (Hidi & Renninger, 2006), describes a situation where new concepts or ideas in the domain being studied capture the learner’s attention and curiosity (Table 3). While students may be able to relate some background knowledge or experience to the concepts or ideas of interest, connections between the domain and identity are emerging and often not explicit. In this way, triggered configurations offer an opportunity to broaden someone’s identity. This is often present in early stages of inquiry when students may engage in serious inquiry efforts, but may (or may not) move or search for topics within the domain because the connection to their identity remains implicit. In other situations, this may lead to deeper and sustained inquiry as they progress.

Table 3 Students who demonstrated a triggered configuration
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The triggered configuration illuminates what happens when students make new connections between their identities and situational objects that they inquire about. The ENDURE version of triggered configurations is highly consistent with descriptions in previous research, but suggests that a closer look at students’ identities may explain why the triggers happen in the first place. In particular, we saw that triggered configurations were often stepping stones toward students developing natural configurations, for example, while Kevin, Delilah, and Felicity all had triggered configurations, but remained there for the entire unit of study. In the case of Mario, towards the end of the unit, he was able to make a clear connection between his identity and his area of study, allowing him to make a refinement from looking at growth and hormones to skin in a way that aligned with his medium complexion and family history. Thus, Mario represents a case of a learner with a triggered configuration who transitioned to having a natural configuration.

Imposed configuration

The imposed configuration describes a situation when a learner is deeply involved in inquiry of a topic that they are already engaged with in their everyday life; however, the inquiry is deeply connected to their identity and only superficially to the domain. It is imposed because learners try to make a connection to the domain; however, they are unsuccessful as their interests are too deeply rooted in what they want to study, as opposed to the field that frames the scope of inquiry in the classroom. Thus, learners with imposed configurations often have specific questions which they may fixate on and research seriously.

We did not find any examples of the imposed configuration within our data set from the elementary school; however, they were present in other contexts, particularly when students were given more freedom of choice that broadened the potential curriculum. One would imagine this is more typical in later grades and especially higher education, which was consistent with our findings. The cases of Allison and Zachary (Table 4) both showed the tensions inherent in giving students large degrees of freedom to choose their topics of inquiry, particularly if there are specific curricular goals that need to be met or if it is important to a teacher to have the entire community advance ideas on a similar topic. In a sense, the freedom restricted Allison and Zachary, as they were not open to learn new topics that could have engaged their identities in different ways because they were so fixated on ideas they previously wanted to advance (for better or worse).

Table 4 Students who demonstrated an imposed configuration
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Natural configuration

The natural configuration describes a situation where learners’ interests are deeply rooted in their identities and are pertinent to the domain being studied. This configuration is typically found when a learner shows an enduring interest in something that has clear personal relevance over a period of time. Students with this configuration are highly motivated and inquire deeply into these issues, with their focused inquiry questions guiding them (Table 5).

Table 5 Students who demonstrated a natural configuration
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The natural configuration in many ways represents the ideal situation whereby students are highly motivated and advance knowledge of personal interest to them and the community. This can build on the theory of connected learning (Ito et al., 2020; Peppler et al., 2023), particularly by clarifying the relationship between identities, interests, and domains of study, with direct practical implications about how teachers can get students to attend to their life-long, life-wide, and life-deep learning goals (Banks et al., 2007).

Discussion

Our research questions aimed to examine learning environments that are doubly authentic, as a way to explain the importance of having students engage in collective inquiry in the image of knowledge building culture (the sociocultural view of authenticity) with the idea that students should connect their own identities and follow their interests as part of their inquiry (the humanistic view of authenticity). To do this, we looked at an extensive data set across three different settings, each of which were varieties of doubly authentic designs. Our analysis resulted in a novel conceptual framework called ENDURE (Fig. 1). As its name implies, ENDURE can help explain different ways that students sustain their inquiry in these doubly authentic classroom environments over time. Specifically, we used grounded methods to develop an operational toolkit that allowed us to distinguish between four configurations (disengaged, triggered, imposed, natural) that emerged from our data about the relationship between students’ identities and interests as they are situated within a domain (Table 1).

The primary significance of the ENDURE framework lies in its holistic approach. This framework uniquely integrates several key aspects of the learning process, such as engagement and disengagement (Busteed, 2013), triggered interests (Hidi & Renninger, 2006), and the alignment of learning with students’ interests and goals (Ito et al., 2020). While these concepts are individually well-explored in educational research, ENDURE synthesizes them into a comprehensive model. This integration offers fresh perspectives, especially evident in the framework’s indicators. For instance, previous studies have investigated student disengagement, but ENDURE introduces an innovative view by suggesting that factors like purpose, integration, persistence, and depth collectively influence this phenomenon. The framework posits that there is an underlying architecture which shapes these various learning approaches, providing new insights into the latent structure that governs students’ learning behaviors.

Understanding this underlying structure directly informs the practical aspects of creating and supporting doubly authentic learning environments. For instance, it might be beneficial to extend the initial exploration phase, giving students more time to delve into their identities before they decide on a specific question. Often, educators in inquiry-based learning settings quickly move from the students’ initial questions to the exploration phase. However, they may overlook the importance of revisiting these initial questions or asking students to explain their choices. The ENDURE framework highlights a range of new design considerations that are crucial for effectively facilitating this type of learning environment.

Other than these general contributions, there are four specific insights that emerged from our analysis and findings, having to do with the configurations being relatively stable, discrete, situated, and politicized. First, most of the students in our cases could be best described as having one particular configuration throughout a unit of study. Thus, we would consider the configurations to be relatively stable. It is important to clarify here that inquiry topics and configurations should not be conflated. Stated differently, if a learner’s configuration is stable, this does not imply that their inquiry is fixed. Their questions could evolve, the knowledge they advance can change, and even the connections they make to their identities can be strengthened. The key idea is that configurations describe the relationships between relatively fixed conceptual entities (identities, interests, and inquiry areas); our results show that these generally do not change (or are slow to change). Still, this does not mean that they are entirely static even within the course of one unit. As we presented in the cases of Ethan (Table 2) and Mario (Table 3), there are situations whereby configurations transform. These shifts typically signify that students take significantly different approaches to their inquiry.

A second general observation that we made about the configurations is that it was possible to classify most students’ interactions with the course material into one particular configuration, even though several of the indicators (as can be seen in Table 1, such as purpose and depth) cut across different ones. Felicity (Table 3) was a good example of this, as she had one indicator (switching topics) of a disengaged student and the others of those who were triggered. This is further complicated because these configurations are a property of the socially and culturally situated interactions between learners and their environments and are not fixed traits that people have. Therefore, there was some level of ambiguity as to what configuration would best describe a person’s interactions across periods of time. Still, it was possible to make a clear, holistic judgment due to the consistency or patterns in students’ practices across situations, which appeared stable.

A third and related point is that configurations were situated in a particular domain. A student could have had one particular configuration in one domain and a different one in another. Zoe was a great example of this. Her choice of studying cancer was natural in the human body systems unit in large part because her father suffered from leukemia. In the ecology unit that followed, she had a lot of trouble settling on a topic and was disengaged.

Lastly, our data showed us how the sociocultural and political context interplays with ENDURE, along with the idea that everything in education is political (Freire, 1970). We can consider the example of Delilah, an early pubescent fifth grade student, who started the unit with a natural configuration based on her questions around menstruation. However, school rules prohibited such topics from being studied outside of parent-approved health class, leading her teacher to intervene and block her interest. It took Delilah a large part of the unit to develop a triggered configuration, whereby her identity connected to her new inquiry topic. This point illustrates the tensions between giving students freedom to learn (Rogers, 1969) with sociopolitical constraints about curriculum and what can be studied in schools. In doubly authentic designs, there is a tension between individuality (humanistic perspective) with collective responsibility to the domain being studied (sociocultural perspective). While these two perspectives often align, such as in suggesting that inquiry-based learning should be a fundamental pedagogy, there are also inherent tensions between them. There is no one way to navigate these tensions. Some teachers in doubly authentic designs may privilege the individual freedoms, whereas others — such as in the case of Delilah — may privilege the sociocultural issues. The context also factors in here. For example, the tensions in higher education may be more about individuality versus being authentic to the ideas in the domain. Meaning, the academic discipline will create the boundaries whereby a student can build knowledge. With younger children, the community norms trying to decide what is appropriate at each developmental stage may play an important factor. We are not necessarily taking a position on this matter, aside from showing how ENDURE has the potential to draw out this tension.

Limitations and next steps

While we believe this study makes a significant contribution to a number of areas of related research, we consider it to be in its early stages. For ENDURE to be widely applicable, the operational toolkit must be verified across a broad range of settings where we are not the co-designers. A second limitation has to do with the operational ability of ENDURE (Table 1). While we believe the indicators are coherent, even we needed to engage in a great deal of discussion — which involved searching for multiple pieces of evidence — before we reached a consensus about a particular view (Schoenfeld et al., 1993). At times, we revisited cases and even disagreed with our previous interpretations. Therefore, it is incumbent on us, or future researchers, to further verify and check the reliability of ENDURE in its present instantiation.

Having established the ENDURE framework, an important next step of this research would be to undertake a comparative analysis of how students’ interests, identities, and inquiry areas are instantiated across various traditional classrooms, inquiry-based learning designs, KBCs, and HKBCs, in similar settings (e.g., eighth grade science; higher education courses). This comparative study could yield valuable insights into practices for facilitating student engagement in purposeful, integrated, persistent, and deep learning. While we would expect to find these configurations across all of these settings, we hypothesize that those that give students the freedom to inquire, coupled with specialized humanistic activities, are more likely to foster a higher incidence of students exhibiting idealized configurations (both triggered and natural). Empirical studies would need to verify this before we can draw any conclusions.

A crucial next step in this research involves a stronger emphasis on equity and justice. While current efforts touch on some aspects, like the politicized nature of learning and the balance between individual and collective interests in student inquiry, there is much room to explore issues of fairness, diversity, and inclusion more thoroughly. One area we have not yet examined is the complexity of identities and their impact on learning. For instance, identities can be domain-specific (like Zoe’s interest in studying diseases) or more general (such as being perceived as a “good learner” who engages with various topics). Understanding how these different layers of identity influence a student’s motivation and confidence in focusing on an interest is crucial. Future research should aim to explore and address these facets more deeply.

Conclusion

Notwithstanding the conceptual contribution of this work, the implications of this research to the world of educational practice is that it provides a way for teachers, and even students (if they learn the framework as part of their instruction), to identify their own configurations, empowering them to engage differently in their learning or knowledge building process. This is similar to other growth-oriented approaches (Kashi & Hod, 2022), such as grit (Duckworth, 2016) or mindset (Dweck, 2006), which are often used as reflective instructional tools to help students sustain their learning in the face of obstacles. By adding another perspective to this line of work, we hope to advance the theory and practice of education in contexts where students are asked to engage in complex, real-world tasks that they personally connect to. In today’s age, it is imperative to attend to both forms of authenticity so that students can endure the challenges of engaging in self-directed learning in complex social settings.