Since I believed that the best way to teach skills (such as problem solving or critical thinking) was to embed that teaching in a wider curricular context, the issue to me became: “How can I turn my course curriculum into a series of problems for students to solve”? In my practice, I played with designs that altered the way I defined “real” and my post is perhaps weak in not making that distinction clearer. I developed a curricular design approach that worked for me: I used “challenge scenarios”. I often created fictional contexts embedded in scenarios (taking a step away from ‘real world’ designs), but I maintained “real” in two ways. First, the problems I posed were real in the sense that students had to really solve a problem and I did not have a pre-conceived solution for how the problem was to be solved. Second, I often had the students present in front of real panels (other students, teachers, parents, school bus drivers, and others).

I can give a concrete example of this. My British literature course involved teaching The Canterbury Tales. One of the bits that I wanted students to understand about Chaucer was that his use of descriptive detail — his realism — was significant and an important aspect of his genius. I developed a fictive scenario in which the students were stained glass artisans who were charged with translating “The Pardoner’s Tale” into a stained glass window. Some students were assigned a Romanesque church and some a Gothic church. This assignment was directly tied to my course. It involved reading, research, and so on. Although the scenario was obviously fictive, the problem solving process within that scenario was very real. At the end of their challenge, they had to present their “windows” in public to a live audience (guests we invited into the classroom) who pretended to be the ones in charge of “accepting” the designs for their church.

The use of fictive scenarios such as this very much helped me bridge between “real world problems” and my curriculum. It also helped us to maintain a sense of play in our learning that I thought was very important. I will write a post on this topic within a week or two. Thank you for your comment. I did appreciate it.

What you advocate for is sensible and it does get to the heart of learning. What I wonder though is how much of this learning should occur within “authentic” contexts (that is, real-life and student-driven). Because in as much I understand your argument I can’t help but think that my sense of the self, my intellectual identity, my very own humanness was shaped mostly by what today is perceived as “inauthentic” – stories, poetry, readings about great civilizations, biographies of scientists or writers…

Should we dismiss certain subjects or approaches to learning just because they do not feed this urgency and “realness”? Isn’t this a sort of pragmatic way of representing the “me” culture – what interests me, what is useful to me, what matches my interests? As a learner (even now) I was always interested about “other” – people, cultures, ideas.

I am not even arguing – I am trying to understand where the balance rests…as I am aware of both arguments.

I’m in complete agreement that we need to reform how we do assessment in schools. We are starting in a bit of a hole though. John Scammell recently shared on his blog that 97% of people surveyed (via the Edmonton Journal) who believed “that grades are like pay for work believe strongly that students should get 0′s for missed work.” So the general perception in the public is that assessment is intended only for review, and it may be because that’s the only system they know.