Authentic audience

Authentic audience is a concept in education that places elevated value on exposing students’ work to external audiences, who then engage with it organically or from the point of view of a subject-matter expert. Advocates believe that authentic audiences make student projects more relevant by giving them a practical purpose in the real world.

Educators primarily leverage authentic audiences in the arts and humanities, particularly for student projects involving writing composition. However, teachers also encourage students to find authentic audiences in mathematics, the sciences, and many other academic areas. Some educational models also endorse the use of external subject-matter experts or authorities in assessing and grading projects that use authentic audience frameworks. According to the experiences of some educators, the presence of an authentic audience also inspires greater levels of engagement and effort, as students know in advance that their work will be viewed by people other than their teachers.

Background

Traditional approaches to educational task design use insular audience frameworks that largely confine student work exclusively to the classroom. In these contexts, students create projects solely for viewing by their instructors and/or peers. While these tasks allow learners to develop and practice targeted academic skills and display knowledge acquisition and synthesis, some educators believe that their inherent audience-based limitations impede students from fully engaging with assigned tasks.

Education experts and researchers began to develop alternative frameworks during the second half of the twentieth century, with an educational reform movement developing around a concept known as active learning during the 1980s and 1990s. Educators proposed multiple active learning models during this time frame. These models took a multitude of approaches but consistently oriented students toward drawing on their own experiences as a tool for deriving meaning from activity-focused learning tasks. In so doing, active learning models eschewed the established strategy of simply acquiring and reiterating fact-based and concept-based knowledge in subject-specific fields.

As teaching models rooted in active learning theory began to be implemented at the classroom level, educators began to detect a novel set of shortcomings. While the experience-based focus gave classroom work more immediate relevance to learners, teachers also noticed that student-led, activity-based projects were limited by a lack of intellectual quality standards. For example, small numbers of high-achieving students tended to dominate group-based active learning assignments, allowing other group members to share in the academic success of the project without contributing anything of value. In other cases, students were able to navigate assignments using snippets of surface-level knowledge rather than working to gain a deep and detailed understanding of the task’s underlying concept. These limitations prompted skepticism from both parents and educators, resulting in many teachers and institutions becoming wary of deeply integrating them into their programs and curricula.

Authentic approaches to learning evolved as a response to the performance-related deficiencies of early active learning models. Educators conceived of authentic learning as a strategy for creating a clear set of intellectual quality standards while simultaneously addressing common criticisms related to the triviality or irrelevance of fact-based learning in fields with no obvious or direct applications to common spheres of student experience.

Overview

The notion of the authentic audience is rooted within a broader pedagogical framework known as authentic learning. Authentic learning differentiates itself by rooting student inquiry in real-world applications with meaningful relevance to each individual student. To this end, it maintains a student-led focus by affording learners a degree of choice over the content and direction of their projects and assignments. The notion of the authentic audience extends authentic learning beyond the classroom by involving third parties in the engagement and assessment processes. Elevated intellectual quality and assessment standards that include external subject-matter authorities also address the flaws noted in early active learning paradigms.

Schools that match students with authentic audiences frequently recruit parents and other members of the local community to serve as outside experts. In other cases, students submit their work to publications that accept work from students, with the resultant professional feedback and guidance helping students develop their strengths and identify areas of weakness for targeted improvement. External competitions provide another forum for connecting with authentic audiences, offering particular value in situations where the scope or subject matter of the assigned task extends beyond the expertise of classroom instructors and local expert networks.

The active audience concept has particularly strong associations with the field of language arts, especially with regard to writing composition. Learning models propose building networks of external experts, including established authors, journalists, editors, publishers, and interviewers, but the authentic audience concept can also be applied in creative and socially relevant ways. For example, students in English as a second language (ESL) programs may be assigned to write short memoirs documenting their personal experiences with immigration and settling in a new country. Their accounts could then be shared with news or cultural publications, agencies, and organizations that provide settlement assistance to newcomers, as well as other members of immigrant communities.

Educators also use teaching programs rooted in authentic audiences in the visual and fine arts, sciences, mathematics, and social studies. Expert networks in the visual and fine arts may include working artists, art critics, graphic designers, dancers and choreographers, museum curators, and musicians. In the sciences, external audiences can engage medical doctors, researchers, ecologists, engineers, and academics in the assessment process. Mathematics projects can be submitted for review by computer scientists, architects, economists, statisticians, financial planners, and financial analysts. The insights and expertise of lawyers, politicians, historians, activists, archivists, and anthropologists can be valuable to active audience projects in the social sciences. In theory, each of these cases allows students to gain a direct and impactful understanding of how their classroom learning applies to the real world and how it helps prepare them for a future career. Authentic audiences also support elevated intellectual quality standards while also imbuing student work with an element of practical importance, which educators and curriculum designers cite as a critical tool for driving engagement.

Bibliography

Burns, Monica. “The Value of an Authentic Audience.” Edutopia, 15 Nov. 2016, www.edutopia.org/article/value-of-authentic-audience-monica-burns. Accessed 24 Dec. 2024.

Ferlazzo, Larry. “Ways Students Can Write for ‘Authentic Audiences.’” Education Week, 7 Oct. 2019, www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/opinion-ways-students-can-write-for-authentic-audiences/2019/10. Accessed 24 Dec. 2024.

McCarthy, John. “4 Paths to Engaging Authentic Purpose and Audience.” Edutopia, 13 Apr. 2015, www.edutopia.org/blog/differentiated-instruction-authentic-purpose-audience-john-mccarthy. Accessed 24 Dec. 2024.

McKinney, Grayson, and Zach Rondot. The Expert Effect: A Three-Part System to Break Down the Walls of Your Classroom and Connect Your Students to the World. EduMatch, 2021.

McTighe, Jay, Kristina Doubet, and Eric M. Carbaugh. Designing Authentic Performance Tasks and Projects: Tools for Meaningful Learning and Assessment. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 2020.

Newmann, Fred M., Helen M. Marks, and Adam Gamoran. “Authentic Pedagogy and Student Performance.” American Journal of Education, vol. 104, no. 4, 1996, pp. 280–312.

Schulten, Katherine. “Writing for an Audience Beyond the Teacher: 10 Reasons to Send Student Work Out Into the World.” The New York Times, 28 Nov. 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/11/15/learning/writing-for-audience-beyond-teacher.html. Accessed 24 Dec. 2024.