Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australasia
This paper explores the theory and practice of embedding authentic learning and assessment activities into the social work curriculum at Charles Darwin University in the Northern Territory. Authentic pedagogies are a natural fit for social work education more broadly, but also fit with the specific ‘learning community’ approach that the University applies to local social work education. The focus of this paper is on implementing a partnership based process for developing authentic learning tasks. Four case studies exploring diverse authentic learning tasks from the University’s social work curriculum are presented. These relate to field education, community work, building safe communities and research methods.
Keywords: authentic learning, learning communities, social work