The use value of real-world projects: Children and community-based experts connecting through school work

In this paper we discuss how the products of student work during long-term, interdisciplinary curricular units at King Middle School, a grades 6-8 public school in Portland, Maine, through their aesthetic qualities, transformed people’s understanding of what children were capable of. We argue that, to effectively understand student work of this type, ‘cognitive’ and ‘practical’ criteria for evaluation – i.e., as a supposed indicator of what students need to know and be able to do – fail to convey the actual, substantive value of the work, rendering it relatively static and meaningless like much conventional schoolwork. Instead, we argue that aesthetic criteria can help to adequately understand and assess community-based, project work. Moreover, focusing only on student learning throughout the production process occludes the importance of collaboration, communication, and dialogue with an audience: in this case, community experts whose goals and interests must be accommodated as students do their work. The aim of the article is twofold: 1) to present a coherent picture of student project work that adequately captures its complexity both in the process of its production, and in its use-value upon completion; and 2) to argue for the importance of aesthetic criteria in planning and assessing student projects. Dr. Alison Rheingold is the Director of Professional Learning at the Christa McAuliffe Charter School in Framingham, Massachusetts. Her primary role is to develop teachers’ passion for designing and implementing community-based, interdisciplinary curriculum for middle school children. Jayson Seaman is Associate Professor of Kinesiology and Affiliate Associate Professor of Education at the University of New Hampshire. His research interests include the historical foundations of experiential education, youth development, learning in informal settings, and adolescent identity formation. He is the co-author (with John Quay) of John Dewey and Education Outdoors (Sense, 2013).  ISSN: 2325-3290 (online) The Use-Value and Real-World Projects Alison Rheingold and Jayson Seaman Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal | http://dpj.pitt. edu DOI: 10.5195/dpj.2017. 165 | Vol. 5 (2017) A2 Introduction The function of art has always been to break through the crust of conventionalized and routine consciousness (John Dewey, 1927/1954, p. 183) Something almost indescribable happens when adults see beautiful work created by children, or when an audience watches a child’s top-notch performance; they become overtly emotional, perhaps wondering, “How can a child of this age have produced something that good? ” Or they might observe: “I am impressed that the child cared enough to work that hard on the project. ” When children’s academic work embodies certain qualities, it can be much more than a demonstration of content knowledge and skills – it can transform students and audiences, functioning as art in the sense John Dewey describes. This paper discusses how the products of student work during long-term curricular units at one public middle school demonstrated this kind of aesthetic quality. We argue that, to effectively understand student work of this type, ‘cognitive’ and ‘practical’ criteria for evaluation– i.e., as a supposed indicator of what students need to know and be able to do – fail to convey the actual, substantive value of the work, rendering it relatively static and meaningless like much conventional schoolwork. We argue that aesthetic criteria helps to adequately understand and assess project work, particularly when it communicates meaning and value to people outside of the school. Moreover, focusing only on student learning during project work obscures the importance of collaboration, communication, and dialogue with an audience: in this case, local experts whose goals and interests must be accommodated throughout the production process. We therefore also argue for seeing student labor on real world projects as “boundary work” (Star & Griesemer, 1989) crucial to understanding the ultimate value of what they produce. The purpose of the article is twofold: 1) to present a coherent picture of student project work that captures its complexity both in the process of its production, and in its use-value upon completion; and 2) to argue for the importance of aesthetic criteria in planning and assessing student projects. Our broader aim is to show the provocative nature of aesthetic criteria for assessing the quality of educational outcomes. Overview of the Study For over 20 years, children at King Middle School, a school serving grades 6-8 in Portland, Maine (“King”) have created high-quality products and performances of academic work through a model of school reform that focuses on heterogeneous grouping, extended, interdisciplinary, community-based research projects, and sharing student work with audiences. Because of the type of academic inquiry, the quality of student work, and the recognition this school has received over time, students’ products and performances have been seen and used by people throughout the United States and elsewhere in the world. For example, King was profiled on edutopia.com as a ‘school that works’ and was featured in 2010 on Korean public television program as a ‘school of the future. ’ Much of students’ academic work at King, especially the kind of long-term, interdisciplinary projects that provided the context of this study, is done alongside local partners people from the Portland area who actively participate in the planning and execution of academic projects. Students engage in research that often stems from expressed needs of these outside experts. Examples include scientists, journalists, architects, graphic designers, artists, and city council members. Sometimes these experts are also parents of students at King. Through their joint work, students, teachers, and local experts negotiate their understanding of the work, each other, and the broader region. (For specific examples of projects, see Dobbertin (2010)). The Use-Value and Real-World Projects Alison Rheingold and Jayson Seaman Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal | http://dpj.pitt. edu DOI: 10.5195/dpj.2017. 165 | Vol. 5 (2017) A3 What students produce at this school is radically different from ordinary schoolwork. In many schools, students’ work (literally) falls into what Sidorkin (2001) calls the “wastebasket economy. ” Sidorkin urges a focus on the use value of student products. He argues that the value of student work – what they make through their labor – at any school depends on many factors including what students produce, why it was created, and who ‘uses’ or ‘consumes’ it. Based on these criteria, unlike consumer commodities, most student work has no use value at all. Imagine a worksheet or test: children labor to produce them but cannot use them, parents cannot use them, and even teachers cannot use them except as a rationale for doing and keeping their jobs (they require grading). Therefore the ‘use value’ of most student work is nil: at best, it might end up on a parent’s refrigerator as a nostalgic artifact, but most ends up in the recycle bin. In school, “learning is a byproduct of making useless things,” Sidorkin writes (2001, p. 94). The psychological consequences of endlessly making useless things are predictably severe, resulting in de-motivation and alienation from one’s creative potential as well as from the social communities that confer value on one’s work (Lave, 1990; Lave & McDermott, 2002). Advocates of project-based learning have compellingly argued that projects disrupt the typical disutility of schoolwork and therefore possess much stronger motivational potential (e.g., Blumenfeld et al., 1991). Two elements are central to this line of argument: projects’ collaborative nature (Poortvliet & Darnon, 2010) and the use value of what students actually produce (Wardekker, Boersma, Ten Dame, & Volman, 2011). These ‘affordances’ give project work a kind of dual valence: their work is born from a desire to associate with peers as well as a sense that what one produces will mean something to someone other than the teacher. And, awareness that one’s work will receive scrutiny by an outside audience can add additional motivational force (Magnifico, 2010). Rarely considered in these arguments, however, is what student work does for its recipients outside the school: the group, ostensibly, who ultimately will confer value. Some authors have focused on the potential benefit of service learning, asking, “How did community partners perceive the program? ” (Baker & Murray, 2011, p. 125). Likewise, Sanders (2006) lays out a range of successful school partnerships, which on the “extensive” end include “long term, bi or multidirectional, high level of interaction, extensive planning and coordination” (p. 8) But what is the actual value of student work – the things children produce? Moreover, how should this value be considered? We believe this is a crucial question that, as our analysis will show, affects how project work might be more fully understood, as well as having implications for the dialogic potential of this work in educational settings. At King, for example, a significant amount of students’ work possesses the above affordances. It is very different from work that more typically earns only a teacher’s, and perhaps a parent’s, scrutiny. Teachers in all content areas at King purposefully aim students toward work modeled after a professional’s, and student products are indeed of such a high degree of quality to be worthy of genuine praise (U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan lauded compliments on it in a 2010 visit). But, there is quality work and then there is quality work; at the middle school level, it is quite rare for students to produce work that approaches that of professionals – and, importantly, no one really expects this. Nonetheless, the animating discourse at King is for stud