Audience, Artifacts, and Assessment: How “Making Student Work Public” Sustains School Reform and Shapes Student Participation

• In Event: Roundtable Session 90
  In Roundtable Session: Hot-Button Issues in Changing Times

Abstract

Curricular practices, when consistent throughout a school - and across time - become part of the fabric of a school and the surrounding community. Institutionalized practices shape student participation which, in turn, shapes these school-wide practices. Specifically, when ‘making student work public’ is emphasized certain affordances exist for student engagement and for sustaining school-wide reform. This study explores one school’s 20-years of putting artifacts – products and performances that are the result of multi-month, interdisciplinary projects - in front of audiences. Because student work is both related to the community and shared publicly, students, the school-as-a-whole, and audience members become entwined in a particular cultural practice of assessment that is distinctive, but not separate from, the current standards and accountability climate.

Author

• Alison Rheingold, University of New Hampshire