Addressing Authentic Contexts

Topics and content are relevant and contextualized for learners.

Authentic learning refers to the relevance of a project in two ways (Grossman et al., 2019):

1. What students learn is meaningful beyond the classroom. Is the project of value to a student's family? To the community?

2. The students have a personal connection to the project. Is working on the project meaningful to the students?

Relevant projects are appropriate to students' level of development, but they also challenge students to grow intellectually.

Authentic learning can take students into the community to apply what they are learning to understand their community context better and even to help solve community problems.

In project-based learning, teachers set the process in motion by exposing students to a problem. In June 2019, English teachers walked through the community of Puerto Ayora to document trash pollution. Then they went to the docks and performed a chant to raise awareness about keeping the community clean, both activities that could be part of a project on reducing pollution. In the first video, English teacher Fernando Hernández explains why he thinks such field trips are valuable for learning. In the second video, English teachers from San Cristóbal and Isabela perform a chant about reducing plastic use as part of a lesson on reducing plastic use to preserve clean beaches.

Resources

Contextualization Evaluation Checklist - María José and Danielle have prepared a checklist to guide contextualization.

Shaping the Way We Teach English, Module 1: Contextualization - This video-based module demonstrates how to contextualize instruction.