(This is my seventh post in a series of entries I’m using to participate in Blaugust for 2026.) You may have noticed that each of my Blaugust posts is hung on a hook that is another article (sometimes several), sometimes only loosely related to my topic. I’m liking the idea of using these as jumping off points, and the whole thing feels far less derivative than the “articles” I’ve frequently found in the past that were “Here’s a video with a paragraph about it that hits word count but really just watch the video.” There’s a purpose for those, but I want to distance myself from them. The Setup With that in mind, PetaPixel has a story on The National Gallery of Art announcing an exhibit “that will trace African American photographers and portrait subjects from the earliest days of photography.” I like how this got through the draconian policies of our current administration, as acknowledging that any non-white, cishet male existed and sometimes had problems in the 1800s is grounds for content warning signs placed outside your museum these days. (I’m looking forward to the days when people look at that last sentence with disbelief.) The Tie-In So here’s the thing: Most of my students are African American. I’m not looking up the numbers for this, but it’s like 95+% of them. It’s so prevalent that in spite of my own heritage being a mix of Irish/Scottish/German one of my students found out only last year that I’m not black. They just assumed everyone in the building was, because everyone in their class was. (In their defense, they have a sibling who is very light skinned, so they thought I was like their sibling.) So yeah, I have a student population where, when they see most pop culture media, people who look like them are regulated to the “token black friend” casting role. Having a whole exhibit that tells them “No, people who look like you have been using cameras for almost as long as they’ve existed” is a powerful thing. My Students’ Work One of the things I love about my content area (by that I mean Digital Media Arts) is that it has a district-wide theme of amplifying student voices. I didn’t come up with that, but I feel like it was pulled subconsciously from my brain and put into the official documentation. I teach in an arts school, where we have multiple disciplines to showcase: Visual Arts (of course…), Dance, Theater, Chorus, I could go on. But the one I teach? Media Arts? It’s how the others get shown off outside of a school gym. There’s a hazard to this, though. Artists usually want only their best work to be seen by others. Artists are also usually their own worst critics. This does not lead to a healthy combination. I’ve students who will avoid handing work in because late assignments don’t get seen and critiqued by their peers. (They also really hurt grades to a degree that submitting unfinished work will not, but if logic always overpowered anxiety I wouldn’t still have acrophobia.) And then there’s the teacher involvement. I’ve long felt that art teachers could be sorted into two categories: Those who presented student work as accurate representations of what the students were able to do, and those who wanted to showcase the best art possible. Those aren’t the same thing. Everyone makes mistakes, but students have more to learn and therefore make more of them. I’ve seen vis art teachers gluing collages back together, going over drawings with markers to fix the linework, and other atrocities to make the student work look nicer. In the end they had work they were happy to showcase, but saying it was done by the students was not really honest any more. The Solution? I’ve many goals for the upcoming school year, but one of them is to provide a wider audience to my students. Many things get easier by doing them, and showing your work to others is included in that. There’s still a need for curation (self and by others), but having my department be more visible is likely to lead to more students getting comfortable with the idea that others will see what they do. It’s a lot of work. I’m not sure I can manage that with all of my other duties, but I can delegate. Among other things, I teach presentation. I can have my 8th graders work to curate student projects in ways I can share with a wider audience. As the teacher I’ll have to have the last say in what goes live (not to mention managing publicity release forms, etc.), but that’s a small portion of the effort needed. Having my students do the initial curating removes me a bit from the process, but this is an ideal result. The goal is for STUDENT voices to be amplified. If I become that teacher with a marker to fix the line work, then I’m inserting my own voice into things. That ruins the whole point of all of this. Sure, as the adult in the room I need to be the last say in what goes live, but by the time I’m making that call there should be few, if any, creative decisions left. The next hurdle is in HOW to present the work. I teach web design, but I don’t have a school-approved web host I can use for that. Google tools are for the most part approved, but students can’t make anything in Google Sites, Docs, etc. be viewable outside of our district. I understand and agree with these limitations. I don’t want them reversed, that opens the doors to too many headaches, but it does make things harder. The simplest solution I see is for the 8th grader making the showcase to put the whole thing into a video and send it over to me to import to my own account and change the permission settings so a wider audience can see it. I need to check the whole video anyway, so that’s fine. Another option would be for them to make a Google Presentation that I again copy over to my own account. Video and audio embedding can be done this way, and it’s actually how our Vis Art department did their art showcases back during our distance learning years. The issue that arises is that permissions for the Google Presentation aren’t the same as the embedded media. You can see all the slides but then get an error for a video if the video has more restrictions. This is, in fact, something I learned from the aforementioned Vis Art shows. So I have a rough semblance of the outline of a plan. It might get changed a lot as I talk it out with the other teacher in my department as well as our school admin. We’ll see how this goes.