Audience Versus Community

The kids in my class are used to walking down the street and knowing most of the people that they run into. Our community has approximately 1 000 people in it and our school has about 165 students from K - 12. While not the best environment for every kid, a small community like ours  usually ensures that kids are safe, cared for, and get personal attention. I am completely used to going to the grocery store and running into my students, or being out for a walk in the evening with my own sons and others stopping us to talk.

It is part of our community.

Audience on the other hand can be a touchy thing. Audience brings the word "fame" to mind. As in, if you have a large enough audience for your work, you must be famous. Having a large audience for your work can be a good thing. An audience may motivate you, drive you to continue with your work, and push you to innovate and try new things. Audience can bring new opportunities. But an audience can be finicky, demanding, and intimidating.

I wonder about the value and the dangers of exposing students to "audience," compared to "community?" I have uploaded probably several hundred examples of student works over the last 5 - 7 years. From websites to podcasts and videos, we place their work online to allow others to see what students have made and to give kids a sense of pride and motivate them to continue.

But this is not community.

Audience drives up page view numbers, video and podcast downloads, and leaves comments on blogs like: "LOL, this is the coolest thing I've ever seen!" Audiences drive by and look at the what the locals are doing, but rarely stop in and often don't return. Audiences come for the individual performance, but are not fans.

But community is different.

Communities are long lasting and are supportive in good times and in bad. Communities drive people forward to think, to examine, to dig deep, and maybe even to change. Communities take time to develop, but stay the course. Communities are usually smaller and more intense then audience, often having a personal stake in what happens and in what develops.

For kids, we need both audience and community. For too long, when an audience for student work was found by placing their books in the school library, and publishing it in the school newsletter, audience and community were close to the same thing. This is no longer true. Kids can have an audience for their work that is global and potentially huge. But they must also learn what it means to be part of a community. They must learn to be part of a long lasting network of learners who stay the course of time, digging deeper, developing a personal stake and a voice in the developments that occur. While it is motivating for them to see the hit counters on their blogs driving upwards; audience does not equal learning. I want my classroom to be about learning and about the development of individual voice and understanding, not about developing a drive by sensationalist carnival of student developed content. The difference can be huge.

technorati tags:audience, community, learning, classrooms, web, 2.0

Comments

[joanna]

This is a great post--thanks for discussing the differences between community and audience as it has been an issue rolling around incoherently in the back of my mind for the past year. I teach at a community college, so my students are older than yours, but the idea still applies.

One thing to add is the importance of understanding how to deal with a global community in terms of privacy and identity. An audience can afford to be considered vaguely if the student has the gist of the assignment, but if she is interacting with the world, she needs to know how to navigate that. I'll bet this isn't news to you ; ). How do plan for both the possibility of interation with others in cyberspace as well as making sure that your students aren't being preyed upon?

As a writing instructor, the idea of audience as "driveby" reader rather than a "community member" is provocative, and I thank you for giving me the push in the right direction to think about it.

[Brandi Caldwell]

I think that is a great analogy. Audience is something I teach my students when they are writing. My goal for our class blog is that we have a global audience, but I agree that maybe community is more important for comfort purposes before we broaden things to a wider audience. This is something for me to consider as I pilot my first "student-written posts" blog. We will begin in a few weeks, and I may just open it to the members until the students feel some comfort... community.