View Content #26192

By Stephanie Knight, CASLS Assistant Director

Learning must be relevant to students if we are to motivate them to continue in a field of study. Perhaps this is an axiomatic statement. After all, learner relevance and actualization of material and learning experiences are central to various contemporary approaches to learning and assessment such as Project-Based Language Learning (www.bie.org), Authentic Assessment (https://citl.indiana.edu/teaching-resources/assessing-student-learning/authentic-assessment/), and Task-Based Language Learning (www.tblt.org). However, what relevance means has the potential to be quite nebulous, especially when paired with the existence of dogmatic state and local standards. These standards can feel suffocating to the teacher who wishes to facilitate learning tailored to students’ individual motivations for learning.

Yet, to present state and local standards as antithetical to teaching in a way that promotes learner relevance is to construct a false dichotomy. The standards should be seen for what they are: guideposts and stops along a path of knowledge creation. The way in which those guideposts materialize can be created by the teacher, the students, or the the teacher and students in concert. Teachers must simply create and protect space for this personalization of goals to occur.

Consider, for example, the relatively benign Can-Do Statement of I can ask a neighbor to borrow food or supplies. It is easy to think of an engaging scenario in which a teacher creates a series of role plays to help their learners practice borrowing various items in an exploration that is devoid of an overly specific context. Such a practice would be highly communicative, indicative of strong teaching and learning, and yet not truly an embodiment of a classroom activity that considers the student as a whole; where is the student’s voice and ability to explore a topic of importance?

Now consider the same Can-Do Statement experienced in a different classroom. In this classroom, students have completed an introspective inventory in which they have highlighted values and topics that are important to them. When they are presented with the learning target (the Can-Do Statement), they are given time (a minute or so) to reflect on how it relates to their inventories. A student interested in war history offers that he wonders what it would be like to ask a neighbor for food or supplies in a situation of scarcity like a Civil War, a student who loves gaming wonders the best way to ask a fellow player for supplies for an upcoming battle, and a learner interested in the effects of gentrification wonders how that gentrification has impacted strategies neighbors use when asking for supplies. Then, the teacher instructs learners on a general framework for engaging in borrowing sequences, and students extend their learning by journaling about their context of interest. Then, they create the role plays with the teacher so as to share what they learned about their specific contexts.

An approach like this is admittedly riddled with costs; there is a time cost in protecting space for learners to personalize learning goals, and depending on how much each learner shares with the class regarding his or her personalized knowledge, the pace with which the content is covered could be slowed. Additionally, teachers have to craft activities to teach learners how to learn on their own so that they are intentional in engaging in their explorations. Yet, the value of protecting the space for learners to personalize and actualize their learning is inherent and deserving of the costs it engenders. After all, if we aren’t preparing learners to be active participants in their own lives, what are we expending all of our efforts on?