Second to the project launch, the exhibition is the other major highlight of the project. This is an opportunity to share and celebrate the work of students in a public forum.

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Topic: Exhibition

Email 7 (of 9)

Second to the project launch, the exhibition is the other major highlight of the project. This is an opportunity to share and celebrate the work of students in a public forum.

Bring student work into the “real world” to share work with important community members and to foster meaning by putting student work in the position of serving others.

Public presentations of student work—whether as a virtual open house, formal presentations, conferences, or by placing student work among authentic users—drives project-design processes and creates opportunities for authentic assessment.

Activity #1: Create a plan for your virtual exhibition

Activity Notes:

The purpose of this activity is to make a plan for an online exhibition. Just like the project launch, the goal for an exhibition is to generate community engagement, and allow students to see that their work has value to others besides themselves.

Ideas for your online exhibition:

Create or utilize an online forum to showcase student work. Maybe it’s an Instagram party, or a website launch, or a Zoom webinar.
Build in a structure to invite guests before launching your project, if possible. You can create an event using many social media platforms, and plan to have your audience sign up so that students know that their work will be seen.
Think about how you can get people to show up for your students. Because this is a virtual exhibition, it may be easier for experts or professionals to attend since they do not have to travel!
Some other ways to create an authentic audience is by creating a project for an authentic user, like by documenting someone’s history, or by using interdependent collaboration in the project process. A great example of interdependent collaboration is the animated music videos created by students at the University of Newcastle Australia. If students each contribute to different parts of a larger product or design it for a specific user, exhibiting the work will be just as exciting in smaller formats as it is in larger formats.

This is the part of the emails where I start talking in the first person and tell you all the cool things I did in my project “Happy Science” that exemplify this email’s subject area.

I created a website to be a virtual gallery for my students’ final data art pieces. To structure in some accountability, I created the website at the start of the project and created a space for each person’s work to be displayed. As I mentioned earlier, I also reached out to the information designers who inspired the project and one of them agreed to share student work on her social media account.

Similar to how I planned in-person exhibitions, I created student-led exhibition teams to support event planning. I identified different roles students could play depending on how much extra bandwidth they had (literally and figuratively). For example, I had a group of students working to design a media campaign with images that could be shared on different platforms. Finally, I set up an event with Eventbrite so students could see their audience grow in-real-time as they prepared to exhibit their learning.

Resources

The resources for this section consist of samples that you can reference to help you complete the activities for this lesson. Additional resources can be found by going to the course landing page.


	Sample Exhibition Week Email This is a sample project email with activities, assignments, and highlighted resources.

Next Steps

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