Nov. 16, 2025: Authentic Audiences

 I have been thinking quite a bit about authentic audiences this month.  In terms of both elementary students and my college students.

My 5^th grade Gifted students have been finishing up a Veteran’s Legacy Research Project in which they researched veterans buried in our National Cemeteries. In teams, they have been digging into some interesting public documents (think census reports, enlistment papers, etc.) in order to piece together the lives of these ordinary Americans who served. They then created some products to share what they have learned, and each product was designed to be shared with a different authentic audience. They wrote essays, which they read at our school’s Annual Veteran’s Day Breakfast, created a colorful poster to hang in our school’s upstairs hallways, and wrote a Picture Book Biography of their veteran.  Whether they were presenting to a community of adults, a younger class at our school, or their grade level peers, their projects demonstrated an awareness of audience and purpose.

As the fall semester rolls into its last few weeks, my University students are also busy. The Children’s Literature class that I am teaching, requires the students to create a lesson plan for a picture book read aloud, and then to conduct that read aloud lesson with their peers. While I thoroughly enjoyed watching them read these books to their peers, I was also wishing that we had access to a classroom of children. I could imagine their reactions and responses, which would definitely be different than those of their college classmates.

Even my own schedule this month, as an author, has been filled with a variety of different demographics.  From a school author visit, a University Book festival, and an agent pitch session, each was a different audience with a different purpose.

It is the power of an authentic audience that led one of my fellow professors at UCF to seek a partnership with my elementary school where she will bring her entire class out and set up Arts Integrated Science Centers that our 3^rd through 5^th graders will rotate through.  We did it for the first time last year and the ability to plan and teach actual elementary students, provided a different experience for her students. She shared that their debrief and reflections were much deeper and more insightful than previous groups that only presented to their adult peers.  We are looking forward to this week when she will be bringing this year’s class out.

As stated in Education Weekly, authentic audiences enhance, rather than interfere, with our students’ learning.  Clearly, it is worth the effort to try to secure authentic audiences for all of our students, as often as we can.