Class assignments involving students’ background—like charting family trees or drawing on their cultural traditions—have been a standby for generations. But tasks that call for extensive personal information from students can have unintended consequences for their privacy and well-being.
Such assignments can leave out students in complex family situations—those in foster or adoption families, for example—who don’t know, or don’t want to disclose information about their early years or extended family, educators say.
And as more classwork is submitted and given feedback online, students may unintentionally expose identifiable information.
Personal or cultural background can be “a weirdly sensitive subject,” noted Timothy McDonald, an assistant girls’ soccer coach in Texas, in an online Education Week discussion.
Cultural heritage projects at his daughter’s elementary school, for example, were intended to be fun but put pressure on students like his daughter, who did not have extensive ties to a specific background.
“My kid felt excluded, devalued and really had nothing to do or offer, and was made to feel that way by the teachers and staff during the assignments and activities at school,” he said. “She felt like she had no culture.”
Natalie Keller, a special education teacher for the Batavia, N.Y. city school district, agreed that activities meant to be fun and an inclusive can backfire.
“Can we stop?” with class projects that require baby pictures, Keller begged. “So many of my students don’t have baby pictures for a host of reasons,” including her own child, she said.
Personal information can be unintentionally disclosed
Photos, keepsakes, and other personally identifiable submissions can also become a privacy liability for classes hosted on online platforms.
Schools are required to protect students’ grades and other education records under the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. But when activities move online, personally identifiable information can be leaked via peer comments on shared documents, analysis of assignments, and students’ online reflections on their work, a 2020 Ball State University study found.
And often, student information stays online indefinitely.
“Forty years ago, students’ records were kept in folders inside filing cabinets in schools,” wrote Marc Alier, a professor of information technology at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia in Spain, and his colleagues in an international study of student privacy in 2021.
As more class activities are conducted, commented on, and kept in the cloud, students have a higher risk of “unauthorized data access, unintentional unauthorized disclosure of information, and generation and storage of student information by third parties.”
This doesn’t mean teachers should throw out assignments that help students learn to explore oral history or records. But educators should focus on the skills and products they want students to achieve in an assignment, rather than the extent of personal information they share, said Bo Chang, a professor of community education at Ball State and the author of the 2020 study.
Shannon James, a teacher at BASIS charter school in Scottsdale, Ariz., has made some of those modifications. While she still assigns a family tree project for students in her Spanish class, she gave them the option of researching “the family tree of a fictional character, celebrity, or historical figure instead of their own family,” she said in the EdWeek social media discussion.
Dalia Angrand Boisrond, a language and literature teacher at the Boerum Hill School for International Studies in Brooklyn, N.Y., agreed.
“I think it’s important to give options and not completely shy away from assignments like family interviews or trees,” she said. “Provide real, authentic choices (not an add-on alternative), and a lot of drama can be avoided.”
