"Doing" the subject

Wiggins and McTighe remind us that when we design authentic tasks with which to assess our students, "the student's efforts resemble or simulate the kind of work done by people in the field" (154).  This I think gets at a particular challenge facing English Language Arts teachers striving for authentic tasks and assessment.  What field are we preparing our students for?  Life as a novelist, journalist, or academic?  Those are the first things that come to mind when I think of "people in our field."  Copy-writers, editors, marketing executives, those too could be considered people in our field.  But aren't all people who read or write or use the internet or interact socially in a sense in our field too?  I think one of the great benefits of the backwards design and essential questions model is its insistence on the idea that the understandings and skills we teach must be transferable, but I still get tripped up when I apply that to assessment and the creation of activities.  For instance, if in the discussion of a piece of literature in a unit on origins and growing up my students come to understand that our homes may shape us but they don't define us, they have done some authentic work in our field, and those understandings are eminently transferable.  But when it comes to assessment, I might ask my students to write a critical essay about how where a person comes from does or does not shape who they are using evidence from the text.  This is an authentic task in our field, but in the more specific, traditional notion of our field.  We have to broaden this out if we are really going to serve all of our students and make our work authentic.  Emily you mention how much you appreciate the variety of assessment in the UbD model and I feel the same way.  I think the GRASPS model is particularly useful for English teachers because it encourages a kind of variety we might not come to on our own, especially when it comes to culminating projects or performance assessments.  More than once I have thought to myself, but what's wrong with the critical essay—that's our field, that's what we do.  But it's what only a small number of us do.  Students could just as well demonstrate understanding by creating an advertising campaign built around the notion of adventure, escape or a fresh start.  In this sense, essential questions not only deepen the meaning of the work our students do and the problems they get to explore, they can also broaden our own notions of what counts as "authentic" work in our field.