Jack Walton

Authenticity is a very popular term at the moment; to the point that it sometimes provokes an academic eye-roll.

In art, we sometimes use it to describe a sense of realness in our experience of making or perceiving a piece of work. In education, the dominant use at the moment has to do with the way in which the tasks we set our students prompt responses that are more or less in line with the types of things they will encounter outside the classroom.

Because authenticity is an abstract term it cannot have a single essential definition—it always requires some interpretation for it to be meaningful, especially in a practical sense. This is worth pointing out, because our options not only include working backwards to deduce its historical meanings, but also to propose useful interpretations that differ in some respects from what has come before.

This seems applicable to other inherently abstract concepts as well (e.g. knowledge, wellbeing).

This post owes some of its thinking to conversation with James Pawelski.

I was reading Amos Tversky’s classic paper, Features of similarity (1977) this morning, and for some reason it reminded me of Quentin Blake’s also classic children’s book Mrs Armitage on Wheels.

In their own ways, both of these pieces of literature might lead us to ask: When is it better to work on creating a new context?

A ubiquitous feature of human practices is that they involve tools. We use tools to various ends, including to help us make things, and to provide information of some sort (an evaluative function). When an upgrade of some sort comes along, we may trade one tool in for a better alternative.

Under what conditions does it make sense not to focus on changing the tool, but the context? I feel as though this might apply in situations where tools suffer from a problematic premise—this is how I currently see rubrics in educational settings; better rubrics still have the same underlying technological issues. To effect meaningful change in a field like education, it might not be sufficient to focus on tools.

When is it clear that a response to a situation is an error? Sometimes the stakes mean this is an obvious line (e.g. in a surgery, or a lawsuit), but there is often a considerable grey area between good and bad. A ‘response’ isn’t necessarily defined as an instance in time—sometimes things drift into error slowly.

An evaluative performance problem can be thought of as a situation wherein there is a concern with the quality of a given performance. Performances seem (usually) to count as performances when there is some amount of human buy-in—otherwise naturally occurring things can come to be understood as performances when an analyst decides that the thing in question is worthy of attention.

How, then, to distinguish between various kinds of performances?

One way is through tense:

1. The concern could be with evaluating a past performance—say, a recital of a piece of music by a student, or a restaurant experience we’ve just had.
2. The concern could be with evaluating a presently occurring performance—say, we are in the middle of dinner at a restaurant and form a view about our experience as it is unfolding (or perhaps we are in the kitchen, appraising the efficiency of our staff).
3. The concern could be with evaluating a future performance—say, we are picking members for a team that will need to compete in a future sporting event.

Within the model above, the evaluative gaze could be directed at various components of the situation, including the performer as distinct from the performed work (e.g. a plate of food that arrives at our table).

It is also worth noting that the purpose of the evaluation could be multifaceted—it could be about improving future performance, making a rating for certification reasons (e.g. to award a restaurant three stars), or some other reason (including forming conclusions about the future; e.g., whether we’d like to eat at that restaurant again).

Different disciplines seem suited to different aspects of the game outlined above (e.g. deliberate practice might be good for enhancing future performance, but no so helpful when the concern is with the here and now).

I’ve discovered that I like barebones titles; the kind that describe the basic ingredients something is made from—a bit like the way some restaurants label their dishes.

Sticky peanut, coconut, chilli, and lime leaf.

I have a rough idea about what this might be, but there’s no way to be sure. I know I like all of the ingredients listed, but there’s still plenty of room to be surprised as well.

Spanner crab, coriander, lemon, and applewood smoke.

I pulled those words out of the air, but I can picture what it might be about.

Story titles can get away with this too; The Overcoat (Nikolai Gogol); A Clean, Well-Lighted Place (Ernest Hemingway); American Gods (Neil Gaiman).

This doesn’t work so well for research papers, but still seems to hold for books. Why is that?