A reflection on the “Authenticity” chapter of Josh Eyler’s How Humans Learn

I originally wrote this as homework for CPLC Season 1, back in early April, before the Eyler event and the homework were cancelled due to COVID-19. I was going to go back and polish it up, but then I decided to leave it a bit raw, to reflect the strain under which it was written.

Although I’ve been working approximately a billion hours a day every day since March 13, most of that work has been reactive—adjusting syllabi and assignments, trying to track down students, responding to student work, hosting and attending Zoom meetings, scrolling through Twitter in search of advice, help, and reassurance from the voices I trust there, but getting pulled into despair by what I actually find there. Today was the first time I slowed down and really tried to read and to actually think, and I found it incredibly difficult.

This chapter was short, only twenty or so pages, and I think I stopped at least a half dozen times to check Twitter. It wasn’t even conscious, I just kept grabbing my phone and scrolling. Trying to write this piece right now is difficult, but it is helping me cultivate empathy for what my students are experiencing. I’m lucky to have a great deal of autonomy in what and how I teach, and I’ve never been more grateful for my colleagues and administrators for their support. But having to produce this simple “assignment” is challenging, and it’s hard for me to imagine how my students are doing this all day, every day, for four or five different classes, especially as the stakes for them are infinitely higher.

But to get back to this chapter, Eyler first defines what he means by an authenticity: “[A] truly authentic learning experience must have ‘as much fidelity as possible to what students will encounter outside of school in terms of tools, complexity, cognitive functioning, and interactions with people’” (153). Eyler then provides descriptions and examples of several types of authentic learning: undergraduate research opportunities, experiential learning, and immersive experiences. He also explains why prolonged lectures are both ineffective (human brains just aren’t made to absorb information that way) and unjust (they exacerbate inequalities already prevalent in education, particularly in terms of gender and race).

I read through this chapter with Composition on my mind. Teaching Comp is my main responsibility, and I’m always trying to make it a more engaging and rewarding experience for my students (mostly traditional first-year students from across the disciplines). Comp classes at PSU have embraced the Cluster-based model of learning, and I’ve taught a wide variety of themed Composition classes in the past few years (including Gender & Culture, Music, Sports, Mountaineering, and Rock Climbing). I’ve tried to make writing experiences more “authentic” by tying them to these topics and activities. With themes that are more experiential (such as rock climbing), students can engage in authentic writing by “reflecting on the experience, building a conceptual framework from the reflection, and then applying this new knowledge to other scenarios, problems, or questions” (158). But for the less experience-based classes, I need to work more on creating authentic occasions for writing.

One obvious way to achieve writing experiences that are authentic (experiential, research-based, and immersive) would be to connect Comp with our first-year seminar class – Tackling a Wicked Problem. Despite the logistical challenges, I’m pretty sure this work is already being piloted, and I hope to be a bigger part of this work in the future.

Speaking of the future, it’s really hard for me to imagine what that might look like for our university right now. It seems misguided to plan for a future that looks anything like the past. While that’s terrifying to me in many ways, I’m taking some comfort in the avalanche of articles and social media posts that are centering empathy and compassion as our main responsibilities as educators right now, and I’m grateful that our university is modeling that approach, even at the highest levels of administration. I hope that this shift is the start of a revolution in higher education that centers the real, lived experiences of our learners (and educators, 70% of whom are not on the tenure track). I found the epigraph from the start of this chapter to be extraordinarily apt for our times: 

We have cast our lot with learning, and learning will pull us through. But this learning process must be reimbued with the texture and feeling of human experiences shared and interpreted through dialogue with one another.

David A. Kolb, Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development

I hope that learning will pull us through, and I look forward to continued dialogue as we remake the world on the other side of all this.