Authentic curriculum is student-centered. British educator David Hawkins described one inspiration for his authentic curriculum saying, “Everyone knows the best times in teaching have always been the consequence of some little accident that happened to direct attention in some new way, to revitalize an old interest that you hadn’t any notion about how to introduce. Suddenly, there it is. The bird flies in the window, and that’s the miracle you needed.” While small schools enhance opportunities for teachers to become masters of the ‘bird in the window,’ educators complain of having too little time to allow curriculum to be shaped by the individuals and events in their classrooms because of the increase in top-down curriculum mandates and high-stakes testing. Author David Sobel compares this trend to “the homogenization of the American commercial landscape by fast-food restaurants or the decimation of traditional cultural practices with the arrival of television.”
“As the United States moves from a simpler society dominated by a manufacturing economy to a much more complex world based largely on information technologies and knowledge work, its schools are undergoing a once-in-a-century transformation. Never before has the success, and perhaps even survival, of nations been so tightly tied to their ability to learn. Authentic learning and assessment asks students to master intellectual and practical skills that are eminently transferable to real life.”
--Linda Darling-Hammond
