ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the pedagogy of authentic learning as a route to embedding students as active participants in the learning process rather than passive, and often detached, observers of it. Authentic learning focuses on attainment of key skills, has more recently burgeoned under neoliberal education policies on employability that are increasingly global in their effect. The unintended consequence of building pedagogic structures as a response to consumerist frameworks be the deterrence of innovation and the promotion of passive and instrumental attitudes to learning perpetuating a cycle of moral panic on standards of attainment. Community safety is a subject grounded in everyday life and provides an ideal opportunity for students to bring together theory and practice. A more radical development is the potential for opening up the authentic learning context to other courses so that students are able to see specific issues relating to their own subject in relation to others and possibly engendering interdisciplinary collaboration, or multi-agency working.
