By nature, every person can learn. We learn every single day since birth, an indication that learning can happen in our natural setting. As we grow, learning becomes more pervasive to the point of involving institutions to facilitate our learning process.

In the context of education, learning happens in the classroom where the teacher transmits knowledge to the students. Traditionally, education has been equated with knowledge transmission. As the teacher talks and delivers lectures, the students listen. The teacher asks questions and the students respond; the teacher tells the students to read books and memorize and the students comply. The teacher checks whether the students learned what was transmitted to them through a test, usually at the end of the learning process. These are the attributes of traditional learning which has come to be known as “didactic pedagogy”. This kind of pedagogy involves (a) instruction routines; (b) knowledge consuming; (c) recitation of knowledge; and (d) testing memory.

Until today, didactic pedagogy is being used. That was how I was oriented in teaching during my younger years. Even when I moved to graduate school teaching, the same approach of doing lectures and giving tests persisted as a matter of practice. It pained me and most of the teachers around me to alter our ways of teaching. We found it difficult to reconfigure the given physical structure of the classroom. It was problematic on the part of the students if no textbooks are prescribed to serve as the common reference of every learning activity. Our students are always almost on the same page of the book and are doing more or less the same tasks. Our relationship with the students was one of command and compliance as the class is managed with order and control.

But soon enough, I got the biggest break in my pedagogy when I joint an international management school that offers graduate programs both in business and development. I was trained on and got accustomed to the case method of teaching patterned after the Harvard Business School. Doors of opportunities opened for me to write teaching cases and the corresponding teaching notes and more, importantly, adopt other pedagogical methods that are more participative, experiential, and learner-center. I felt I was transformed into using the so-called “authentic pedagogy”.

I used project-based learning in one of my courses on Project Development and Management. As a graduate school course, students were expected to produce a learning artifact in the form of a project proposal that could also include a project feasibility analysis, should the students desire. Students were grouped in learning teams with six to seven members. A community chosen by the professor served as the site of project identification and development. Students were free to identify the project that they want to propose after conducting thorough scanning of the socio-economic environment. They were fielded for about two weeks to meet with the project stakeholders and gather data that the students, themselves, have conceptualized even before the fieldwork. Once finished and validated, the team report is presented to the class with some invited stakeholders.

Authentic pedagogy may not be applicable in all learning situations and to achieve certain learning goals. But overall, it is beneficial for the students. My experience has shown that students were better empowered to search for their knowledge sources and internalize how the learning goals are to be achieved. As students are on fieldwork, the learning environment is a fluid space, the concentration is on group work, and the discursive orientation is student to student. Thus, students develop the ability to speak on their own choice as they involve themselves in the learning process. There is an evident recognition in the differences in student’s interests, capacities, professional backgrounds, and expertise. Since my students come from fifteen different countries, multi-culturalism is appreciated. The learning outputs are presented in plenary and in the presence of some stakeholders whose additional inputs are further considered as part of the real-life learning exercise.

Organizations have varying degrees of adoption of authentic pedagogy. Denhere (2014) cited that authentic learning encourages students to create a tangible, useful product to be shared with their world and the contents collected are organized into portfolios. Lombardi and Oblinger (2007) revealed that authentic learning is compatible with technology since the internet and other emerging communications, visualization, and simulation technologies in current times make it possible for teachers to offer students with learning experiences ranging from experimentation to real-world problem-solving. Reform Talk (1997), a publication of the Comprehensive Regional Assistance Center Consortium believed that authentic pedagogy is not a magic bullet for improving student learning, but it provides a model for looking at the instruction that emphasizes higher-order thinking skills. The Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) has its core philosophy anchored on the authentic learning approach and it has yielded dividends within a relatively short period, garnering global recognition from organizations like the UK Financial Times. Since 2003, the GIBS ranked among the Financial Times' top 50 business schools for Executive Education Open and Custom Programmes. The GIBS MBA is ranked among the top 100 business schools globally in the Financial Times Executive MBA Rankings.

The history of authentic learning could be dated back as early as the 16th century when Descartes proposed the idea of authenticity as following a moral inner voice. Har (2013) reported that Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer further supported Descartes’ idea and elaborated that moral sense and authenticity should be regarded as a voice of nature within ourselves.

Authentic pedagogy imposes certain requirements on the part of the teacher handling the learning process. The Authentic Learning Blueprint (2019) mentioned the quality of work that the teacher should provide the students as rigorous, relevant, reflective, interactive, and integrated. Newman and Wehlage (1993) enumerated the five standards of authentic pedagogy as follows: higher-order thinking, depth of knowledge, connectedness to the world, substantive conversation, and social support for student achievement.

Understandably, there are debates on whether an institution should use didactic or authentic pedagogy. And clearly, there are opposing views on each of them concerning their appropriateness, feasibility, and benefits. It is in these situations where the role of the teacher is both critical and important as his/her decision will influence the achievement of the learning goals and the value created by the learning process. There is no one-size-fits-all approach in choosing the right pedagogy. But the teacher should be both knowledgeable and skillful in determining the best and suitable pedagogy or a combination of didactic and authentic pedagogy.

References

(1) Authentic Learning Blueprint. Facilitators Guide. April 2019. AEA Learning Online. Future Ready Iowa.

(2) Authentic Learning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authentic_learning

(3) Authentic Learning: Teaching for “Real Life”. Envision. 2017. https://www.envisionexperience.com/blog/authentic-learning-teaching-for-real-life

(4) Denhere, Christmas. 2014. Authentic Pedagogy: Implications for Education. European Journal of Research and Reflection in Educational Sciences. The UK.

http://www.idpublications.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/AUTHENTIC-PEDAGOGY-IMPLICATIONS-FOR-EDUCATION.pdf

(5) GIBS Business School. https://www.up.ac.za/gibs-business-school

(6) Har, Lam Blck. 2013. Authentic Learning. The Active Classroom. Hong Kong Institute of Education. https://www.eduhk.hk/aclass/Theories/AuthenticLearning_28June.pdf

(7) Lombardi, M. M. and Dianna G. Oblinger. 2007. Authentic Learning for the 21st Century. Educause Learning Initiative. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220040581_Authentic_Learning_for_the_21st_Century_An_Overview

(8) Newmann, F. & Wehlage, G. (1993). Five standards of authentic instruction. Educational Leadership.

(9) Pereira, Arun. 2019. Course Correction: Recalibrating Experiential Learning in the MBA.

https://www.aacsb.edu/blog/2019/may/course-correction-recalibrating-experiential-learning-in-the-mba

(10) Reform Talk. 1997. Looking at Instruction: Authentic Pedagogy. Comprehensive Regional Assistance Center Consortium. http://archive.wceruw.org/ccvi/pub/ReformTalk/Mar_97.pdf

(11) The four characteristics of ‘authentic learning’. Educational Research Newsletter and Webinar. https://www.ernweb.com/educational-research-articles/the-four-characteristics-of-authentic-learning/