Authentic education provides a unique learning experience to individual learners, specifically by addressing their psychological and neurological needs. The assessment of learners is done through generic attributes that have more validity and relates to intrinsic learner characteristics that could last throughout the life span of the learner. Authentic education looks at the general term education more broadly and deeply, and from multiple perspectives. As the individual learners are identified uniquely through authentic education, it embraces diversity within the human species more broadly and meaningfully. Learners are encouraged to pursue higher-order learning sending them through a complete learning cycle; this engages learners deeply to the task and provides a lasting experience, enabling individuals to reach their full potential. Authentic education aims at providing personal development for individuals broadly, not merely a career development, while still paving a better way ...

The authors engage in a written dialog about their experiences with and understanding of hope and agency in the context of higher education happening in the midst of many converging crises of sustainability. The authors discuss their personal and professional views about teaching sustainability and about leading and collaborating in sustainability-oriented efforts. They consider sustainability and sustainability education efforts as both internal processes that take place within the person and external processes oriented toward others and the world. They explore questions of leadership and authority in relation to hope and agency and discuss the importance of making and communicating honest appraisals of the current situation of humans and the biosphere as a basis for fostering clear-eyed hope and agency in themselves and students.

Authenticity is a concept with an impressive history in Western philosophy and a significant hold on the modern imagination. Inseparable from conceptions of truth and individual fulfillment, authenticity remains a powerful ideal, even as it eludes precise definition. Recently it has also become an organizing principle for many educational initiatives. Education, like authenticity, is opposed to dissimulation, ignorance, manipulation, and related states of misalignment between truth and experience. There is widespread enthusiasm for the promotion of authenticity across different types of education and in the personal identity of educators and students. Most of the scholarly literature pertaining to authenticity in education falls outside the scope of philosophical inquiry. But in all cases, the pursuit of authenticity in education rests on various philosophical assumptions about the nature of truth, reality, ethics, and ultimately, the aims of education. With the influence of Dewey and 20th Century progressive movements in education, authenticity entered the vernacular of educational theory and practice. Attention to the relationship between learning environments and the “real” world has generated pervasive commitments to authentic learning, authentic pedagogies, authentic curriculum, and authentic assessment practices. Here, ‘authenticity’ is used to track the verisimilitude of an educational practice with respect to some external reality. It constitutes an ontological claim about levels of “reality” as well as an epistemological attitude toward learning as the construction of knowledge. In this respect, authenticity intersects debates about constructivism and relativism in education. Likewise, teachers are exhorted to be authentic qua teachers, elevating their true selves above institutional anonymity as a key part of effective teaching. This phenomenon trades on the values of truthfulness and autonomy that are prized in Western modernity but also problematized in the personal identity and ethics literature. The authenticity of students has also been championed as an educational aim, even as the methods for eliciting authenticity in others have been criticized as self-defeating or culturally limiting. Personal authenticity stands in a contested relationship to autonomy, which has been promoted as the key aim of liberal education. The project of creating authentic people through education remains an intense site of research and debate, with important implications for educational ethics and liberal values.

New Social Movement: Education for Change

A standard analysis of the aims of education might proceed by offering three possible areas for their location: first, to serve the needs of society; second, to pass on and develop those ways of knowing and understanding which are the common heritage; third, to help individual learners to develop, either through a process of unfolding from within or through an authentic creation of themselves. Within these parameters, though not entirely co-extensive with these categories, ideas of progressivism (child-centred education) and liberal education can be differentiated. Most obviously progressivism is concerned with the third aim, with the development of the learner. The liberal position seems to align itself with the second aim, of the passing on of ways of knowing and understanding. These are slippery terms, however. The second and third aims, and thus the progressivist position, are liberal in that they are concerned in some sense with the freeing of the learner; both reject an education which is primarily instrumental.

This paper illustrates one student’s experience finding ways to pursue sustainability in a course on political narrative. The student created his own narrative for political and social change based on issues he was already deeply invested in. Tai Chi, practiced at the start of each class, facilitated this narrative creation

[excerpt] "In expanding on the key insights of [critical] scholarship and while building on Vygotsky’s dialectical approach, I present a position termed transformative activist stance (TAS). This position engages ontological and epistemological questions and offers a radical perspective that paves the way for analytical advances in support of research with activist agendas of social transformation. While integrating contributions made by [critical] scholarship, I also delineate contradictions and dilemmas still complicating its progress. The TAS, developed on the foundation of Vygotsky’s approach steeped in dialectical philosophy and progressive socio-political ethos of equality and social transformation, undertakes a bold reassessment of basic assumptions about human ways of being, doing, and knowing with the goal to elaborate foundations for a non-neutral, activist critical scholarship that embraces social action and agency based in political imagination, vision, and commitment to social transformation. Central to this position is the shift away from the ethos of adaptation (so far not sufficiently challenged within critical scholarship) that takes the world for granted and assumes that individuals have to fit in with its status quo, towards the notion that the deliberate, goal-directed and purposeful transformation of the world based in a commitment to, and a vision of, social change is the foundation for human development in all of its expressions encompassing processes of being, doing, and knowing."