Reality By Design: The Rhetoric and Technology of Authenticity in Education

In the first paragraphs of this volume, the author identifies an "authenticity paradox": that the purported real-worldedness of a learning environment, technique, or task is so rhetorically potent that educators frequently call attention to it in pedagogical conversations to legitimize their undertakings, while at the same time, terms such as "real-world" and "authentic" do not require (and even resist) precise delineation.

Using the language of authenticity as a keyhole through which to vi...