OPERATIONALIZING AUTHENTIC AND RELEVANT DISCIPLINARY ENGAGEMENT

We discuss the nature of authenticity and relevance from an interactional perspective motivated by our conviction that the implicit tension between accountability to the discipline on the one hand and the fostering of student agency and authority on the other needs to be recognized and resolved in science education. We argue that the dichotomy between authenticity and relevance is artificial. Drawing on the work of the late Randi Engle on social framing in classrooms (i.e., productive disciplinary engagement and expansive framing), we suggest that authenticity and relevance can be characterized by one holistic construct: Authentic and Relevant Disciplinary Engagement (ARDE). We operationalize ARDE into markers that can be traced in students’ discourse, and illustrate this operationalization with two examples from physics education. The examples show that by shifting attention from what students learn to how they engage in their learning, we can better articulate the implicit tension between accountability to the discipline and the fostering of student agency and authority. Once this tension has been articulated, we can begin seriously pursuing ways to resolve it.