Engaging and Authentic Education Practices

This chapter is an argument for and celebration of lessons learned during the pandemic of 2020 toward the end of designing authentic and engaging learning experiences across education systems. In the forced shift to online and multimodal learning, educators and students experienced challenges of access, equity, and low engagement. However, there is an opportunity to extrapolate the lessons of 2020 for the betterment of education into the future. This chapter describes lessons pertaining to planning and collaboration, classroom environment, humanized online practices, as well as empowering pedagogy. The chapter concludes with three practical application examples for further thought and inspiration. The pandemic year can be one to survive and never think about again or, with the proper perspective, education's greatest learning moment.