Becoming Authentic Professionals: Learning for Authenticity

In a changing and uncertain world, the question of how best to prepare professionals who can move forward into an indeterminate future is being debated with renewed urgency. Authentic learning has been proposed as appropriate to preparing students for work and life beyond formal education. Conventionally, authentic learning has been equated to learning that involves real-life applications of knowledge. In this chapter, we challenge this conceptualisation of authentic learning as too narrow and limited. Drawing on the work of Martin Heidegger, we argue that authenticity in learning need not be an attribute of tasks or learning environments but, rather, is a quality of educational processes that engage students in becoming more fully human. Authenticity is a mode of being human when we take responsibility for shaping our lives and who we are becoming. Against this background, we draw implications of authenticity for professional education and we outline directions for the design of curricula, pedagogy and assessment that promote learning to become authentic professionals.