GATEways to Teacher Education

A journal of the Georgia Association of Teacher Educators

“Why Do I Have to Do This?”: Strategically Connecting Course Content toAuthentic Contexts Beyond the Classroom

Erin F. Klash, Gilbert Dueñas, Shelly H. Bowden, Tami Shelley, Laura Wildman, Kelli Smith, andAustin B. Klash Department of Curriculum, Instruction, and Technology, Auburn University at Montgomery

Frequently, educators hear questions from their students, such as, “Why do we have to do this?” or “When will I ever use this in the real world?” Questions such as these are legitimate and should be of utmost importance to educators at all levels because it directly addresses the relevancy of their course content. Educators should know and be able to communicate the “real world beyond the classroom” value of course content to their students. This paper describes systematic and deliberate approaches used by six faculty members at a regional, four-year university to promote authentic learning which educators can easily adapt and implement in a variety of educational contexts to help bridge the authenticity gap between theory and practice.

Contexts Beyond the Classroom

Erin and her son,Austin, were engaged in a discussion at dinner one evening about his high school coursework. Austin blurted out that the work he had been tasked to complete held no real life purpose and posed the question, “Why do I have to do this?”As an educator and parent, this question resonated clearly. She started thinking about how educators help students to bridge the gap between the need to learn academic content and the applied, authentic “realworld beyond the classroom” value of that content. In other words, she questioned how she deliberately assisted her students in visualizing the relevancy of her course content. Frequently, students in both P-12 and higher education classrooms pose the legitimate question presented byAustin–and rightfully so This question prompted discussion among the authors of this paper, regarding how we, as course instructors, create authentic connections between our course content and our students’lives beyond the classroom

The Value of Authentic Learning

What does it mean to be authentic in the context of learning experiences? On the most basic level, if something is authentic, it is real. In a classroom context, authentic activities are those that have some connection to content and experiences that are real beyond the walls of the classroom. Chen et al. (2013) presented a variety of characteristics that portray authentic tasks such as having “real-world relevance, illdefined problems, sustained investigations, multiple perspectives, collaboration,