Authenticity and Educational Change

Abstract

One of the greatest clichés of educational change, indeed of our time, is that of authenticity. There is no shortage of advocates for authentic leadership, authentic learning and authentic assessment. In this chapter, Debbie Meier cuts through the hackneyed phrases to ask what, if anything there is to this idea of authenticity, and to the idea of authentic learning that motivates many change efforts.

What is authentic and what is artificial, Meier asks? How can anything in schools be truly authentic, when schools by their nature, are so artificial? Are authentic things necessarily good and inauthentic ones bad? How do we decide on these things? Meier teases her readers with examples that provoke creative discomfort around the idea of authenticity, which she uses to push the discussion much further than other writers in the area have done.

In the end, she finds some of the answers to these demanding conceptual questions in practice and draws upon her own experience of transforming Central Park East school in New York to do so. It is here, she shows, in attempts to build powerful, meaningful learning for students in disadvantaged neighbourhoods that the possibilities of authenticity are ultimately to be found.

Keywords

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