A Time and a Place for Authentic Learning20

Numerous schools across the United States have developed the enrichment cluster concept to deal with what many education leaders believe is a crisis in our schools. The focus on test preparation has squeezed more authentic kinds of learning out of the curriculum, thereby minimizing the one aspect of US education that contributes to the innovativeness and creative productivity of the nation’s culture, economy, and leadership role in the world. All learning exists on a continuum that ranges from deductive and prescriptive leaning on one end to inductive, self-selected, and investigative learning on the other. Authentic learning is the vehicle through which everything from basic skills to advanced content and processes come together in the form of student-developed products and services. Students in an ecology and evolutionary biology cluster studied the survival prospects of tropical plants grown in the school’s greenhouse and conducted experiments to explore optimal conditions for propagation.