I’m reaching the end of my first J-term (January term) at Augustana. We had one last year too, but I didn’t teach then. This term, my students worked incredibly hard to create a digital exhibit about the history of disease at our college. I’m really proud of them for pushing through to the end–the last days of these kinds of projects are always extra exhausting because I’m busy offering feedback and they’re struggling to get the last bits of script/image gathering/editing done. The end result is pretty cool, though–a mix of timelines, infographics, and StoryMaps alongside some of the artifacts themselves. Plus, we all “showed our work” by providing links to all of the documents we found and the spreadsheets where we registered their content. It’s an especially impressive product given the fact that our entire course lasted about three weeks long. Yet we still have 10 oral histories, a good 200+ old newspaper articles logged into research spreadsheets, and a whole exhibition to show for it.
As they are for students, public projects are often a lot of extra work for me too. I care more about the output than I might otherwise because their work goes out to the public under my name. I therefore take a fine tooth comb to their work and I have to build the bigger structure into which their work fits.
So why, if it’s more work for both me and my students, do I still get drawn into public projects with my undergraduate students?
- Audience: Public projects provide students with a bigger audience–a real audience different from what they’re used to. The audience is no longer just me, their stodgy old professor, but their families, their friends, other faculty, and maybe even administrators like the President of our college. Students therefore get to think about how audience shapes their rhetorical choices–a process that gets more and more necessary as they move into different parts of the working world.
- Quality: It could just be me, but I often find that the fact of a bigger, broader audience means that students often do particularly impressive work. Many of them frankly care more about an exhibition that they can share with their families than they do about pleasing their professor. Sure, I’m still giving them a grade, but my judgment probably matters less to them than the judgment offered by people they, you know, actually care about.
- Format: I like the fact that public projects–whether they’re digital or in-person, for a broad-based web audience or for a particular organization–all ask students to research, think, and communicate in formats new to them. Some students thrive when they’re not writing papers but instead giving speeches, writing design panels, or creating reports for a community organization. The change in format can often be invigorating to both students who dislike papers and students who love them.
- They’re Like Jobs: Hopefully, these projects are like fun jobs, but in many ways, they’re a lot more like the kinds of jobs that students end up doing outside of and beyond college. For one thing, I operate much more like students’ boss–well, really, their project manager. They’re necessarily “group projects”–something that students often hate. I get it. I typically didn’t like group projects either. Yet, much of my life, yes, even as a professor, happens through group projects. There are group projects for committees at the college. There are group projects for scholarly organizations. Some of my research ends up being a group project. Although college professors typically retain a fair amount of freedom, we also often have to work within curricular frameworks developed by–and with–others. Hence, even our individual teaching can feel like a group project. I hope that these projects give students a taste of the working world within the confines of a course. At least they won’t get fired!