Authentic Education

Discourses on Individual Learning in Group Settings are concerned with matters of designing tasks, designating roles, and structuring contexts in ways that support the developments of individuals’ conceptual understandings and soft (social) skills.

Systemic Sustainability Education gathers a range of emerging discourses on ecology and complexity, framed by the conviction that discussions of formal schooling have been too narrow – that is, bounded on one end with a focus on the individual and at the other with a focus on society. The biological and the more-than-human have been largely overlooked.

The metaphor of a Learning Cycle is an explicit alternative to the imagery implicit in linearized conceptions of learning. Rather than casting learning as an accumulative process, the metaphor of a Learning Cycle channels attention to the roles experience and reflection. That is, learning is imaged not as lines, steps, and progress, but as iterative loops, elaborations, and growth.

Within the Meaning-Making Metaphor, learning is interpreted in terms of making sense of self, experience, and relationships. The notion falls short of a theory, but it is often invoked in a manner that suggests it is explanatory. That said, the Meaning-Making Metaphor serves as a component of many theories of learning – especially among Coherence Discourses.

The term “Alternative Education” has been applied to many educational movements, curriculum innovations, and teaching approaches that, considered en masse, are linked only in their rejection of mainstream philosophies and practices. For the most part, specific types of Alternative Education are fitted to discourses that sit in the upper right regions of our map.

The Sensemaking Metaphor addresses the ways that people derive meaning from and assign meaning to experiences.

Activist Discourses are focused on interrogating the entrenched narratives and structures that infuse, lend support to, and help to perpetuate social norms and cultural institutions. Oriented by the conviction that there are no “neutral” acts or ideas, and critically attentive to the collective roots of personal convictions, Activist Discourses aim for deep understandings in order to inform and orient justice-oriented thinking and acting.

Learning Design encompasses all activities associated with the development of practices, tasks, resources, and technologies intended to support meaningful and engaged learning in a particular situation. Learning Design discourses are the teaching-focused complement of Emergent Complexity Discourses, which are more focused on the adaptive dynamics of learning systems than on the pragmatics of influencing learning.

Structuralism suggests that meaning exists neither in words, nor in the links between words and whatever those words designate. Rather, meaning is argued to arise and reside in complex, evolving webs of association that span and implicate all aspects of culture.

Progressivism arose as a counterpoint to emphases and structures of 19th-century public schooling. It frames schooling as a participation in life rather than preparation for life. It is often characterized in terms of such defining practices as personalized, lifelong, and experience-based learning; problem-solving and real-world contexts; social and collaborative engagements; and responsible and informed democratic citizens as a main goal of learning.