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Abstract
This paper is concerned with the relationship between authenticity and adult learning and prompted by some studies in which adult ‘authentic learning’ is a central concept. The implication revealed by them is that real‐worldness of learning contexts, learning content and learning tasks is perceived as conferring authenticity on learning. Here, however, it is argued that: (i) authenticity is a way of being hence lies at the heart of understanding adult learning; (ii) authenticity is a way of being hence neither emerges from, nor is conferred by, learning contexts, learning content or learning tasks, regardless of how ‘real world’ they may be; (iii) Being and Having Attitudes, and Actuality and Possibility orientations, are inextricably bound up with authentic and inauthentic modes of being and must be also be accounted for in understanding authenticity in adult learning.
Notes
1. This section is based upon five studies of adult learning in which the notion of authentic learning is central. In discussing them the term ‘learning contexts’ includes ‘learning content’ and ‘learning tasks’, unless otherwise indicated.
2. As used in the above passage (and some others that follow) the term ‘authentic learning’ might be better interpreted as deep or high order learning.
3. The description by Roth and the definition of authentic learning provided (both above) is equally applicable to what we generally refer to as ‘experiential learning’. Indeed, after examining this possibility Knobloch (Citation2003: 31) concluded that experiential learning was ‘conceptually aligned with authentic learning’. They also accord with Revans’s (Citation1982) definition of, and statements about action learning when he set out his approach. Another approach has also emerged recently (‘autonomy‐oriented education’) based on the real‐worldness principle but recognising authenticity as originating in the learner (Aviram Citation2000).
4. Readers wishing to consider views Heidegger’s philosophy more critically might wish to refer to Waterhouse (Citation1981), Golomb (Citation1995), Edwards (Citation2004), Dreyfus (Citation2005), Thomä (Citation2005).
5. See also Russell’s (Citation2007: 371) concept of self as learner where ‘the Being is viewed as both the self as (I) and the self as learner (I‐Learner)… [where] the self is placed both in relation to the self and in relation to learning, thereby creating important ontological questions that only the self can answer’. See also Vaill’s (Citation1996) ‘learning as a way of being’ and Dalla’Alba and Barnacle’s (Citation2007) position that an ‘ontological turn’ is required in higher education.