Authenticity

One of the factors I chose to discuss in my Beliefs About Learning paper is what I chose to call authenticity. What I meant by that is the concept that includes authentic activity and learning by doing and all of those concepts. The idea of education being inseparable from real life.

Today's seminar - Stephen Ashton's presentation of what makes a good children's museum - is making me think along similar lines. It's the authentic that really appeals to the minds of children and, I'd imagine, adults.

When I was little I went frequently to the Denver Children's Museum. It was a great facility, with a lot of fascinating exhibits, but the one that will always stand out in my mind was the one that was the old standard that was always there... the little Safeway store. It was a small replica of a grocery store, scaled down to child size. There were small shopping carts (the novelty of a small shopping cart in itself being enough to get my little heart racing) and aisles filled with fake food. Fake meat, fake jugs of milk, fake boxes of food. And you'd walk around and shop and put them in your cart and then you'd go check out. And here's the really cool thing - you could also be a checkout person. There were Safeway aprons you could put on and you could scan the food across the beepers and it would actually beep. And there was something so exciting about getting to make the food scanner thing beep. It was deeply and profoundly fulfilling.

Why was it that, out of all the scientific and artistic and extraordinary educational exhibits, the one that held my childhood fascination was the miniature grocery store? I'd venture to say that it's the same principle that keeps children playing with baby dolls and wooden hammers and fake money throughout the ages. They want to play with things that they see their parents using every day. They want to do real things.

I want to keep thinking about this and deciding how it applies to instruction in general. I don't think it ends after elementary school - or rather, I think it does, too often, when we get to junior high and have to start studying "real" things like algebra textbooks. And that's also, incidentally, when students start getting jaded, when it stops being cool to like your teachers, when education really becomes entrenched in its utilitarian ruts. And I think that's really what my concentration needs to be.