Abstract

Assignments in education often have a disappointing lifespan: they are assigned, completed, graded, and then disappear. When the currency of academia is grades, how can we help these “one-and-done” assignments have value beyond the classroom?

The Accidental Author is a pedagogical approach designed to extend the lifespan of student work by transforming individual assignments into reproducible, public-facing artifacts. Students still complete regular assignments aligned with the topics being taught throughout the course. Instead of an assignment being "done" once it is graded, however, students return to their work, revise it, and ultimately bring their assignments together as chapters of their own portfolio book. Knowing that their work will live beyond the classroom and reach an audience beyond their instructor encourages students to take greater ownership of what they produce, creating opportunities for more creative, thoughtful work. The process also asks students to revisit previous assignments after receiving feedback, which creates an additional cycle of engagement.

The core of the approach is a simple idea: students are already authors of the work they create throughout a course; they just may not recognize themselves that way. A homework assignment containing code, analysis, visualization, interpretation, and reflection is still an authored piece of work, even though its only audience is the instructor. The Accidental Author changes that audience. By connecting assignments, students can see individual pieces of coursework become part of something larger that they created.

The resulting portfolio documents not only what students have learned, but how they’ve learned. Instead of ending the semester with a collection of disconnected assignments, students leave with a cohesive artifact that they can share with potential employers, graduate programs, friends, and family. The portfolio also becomes a resource that students themselves can return to when completing similar analyses or projects in the future.

The same approach can extend beyond weekly coursework to student research. In a graduate-level implementation of the model, student final projects were transformed into a public-facing research gallery, allowing individual course projects to become part of a larger collection of reproducible student work.

Students do not enter these courses expecting to become authors. In reality, they were authors all along. The Accidental Author simply creates a structure that allows them—and others—to see it.