Find the Audience
A working session on authentic audience in the English classroom
“The drama of education is the constant and persistent drama of possibility and transformation.”
Writing is the most audience-dependent act a student performs, and we routinely strip the audience away. We assign the essay, collect the essay, grade the essay, file the essay. The only reader is the one required by contract to read it. Today we are going to pick one unit that could use new life — and we are going to find it a real audience.
Work quietly for six minutes. Be honest. The unit will not be offended.
- Name a unit, project, or assignment that’s ready for a refresh.What’s it called? What course? What do students make?
- When did it start to feel that way — and how do you know?The signal might be in your students, in your own energy, or in what you find yourself grading at 10 p.m.
- Who is the audience for the student work right now?Be honest. If the answer is “me,” write “me.”
- What happens to the work after it is graded?Where does it go? Who, if anyone, sees it again?
Share the unit you named. Listen for patterns in each other’s answers.
- What patterns do you hear across your table’s units?
- What was alive in this unit the first time you taught it? What’s worth preserving?
- Whose unit at your table is most interesting to you — and why?
The question that matters now: who, specifically, will read this — and what will they do with it?
An authentic audience can be tiny or enormous. One person who matters to a student is often more powerful than three hundred strangers. Start small and specific.
A menu of real audiences
The audience test
If you answer “no” to any of these, it’s not authentic yet.
- Does this audience actually exist and can they actually receive the work?
- Do your students care what this audience thinks — even a little?
- Would the work change — in voice, form, or care — because the audience is real?
- What is the lowest-friction way to actually put the work in front of them?
Sketch your redesign
“What the educator does in teaching is to make it possible for the students to become themselves.”
Colin Dabkowski · colindabkowski.com