What is the purpose of the exhibition?

How do we make this unit different to all of the others? In grade five we give a lot of direction for units over to the students. Students are engaged in the unit development process from the first unit of the year as a means of helping to better prepare for exhibition itself. At our school we are using a model for exhibiton where the students develop their own unit of inquiry - from begining to end - the unit is their own creation. It is this unit development process which I believe sets exhibition apart from all other units.

The IBO lists essential features of the exhibition in its text, Exhibition Guidelines. These features are extensive although still leave room for interpretation: The PYP Exhibiiton must:

• Provide opportunities for the student to exhibit the IB learner profile & attitudes
• Incorporate all key concepts
• Synthesise aspects of all transdisciplinary themes
• Require students to use the transdisciplinary skills
• Explore significant and relevant knowledge
• Provide opportunities for students to engage in action
• Represent a collaborative, student-led, in-depth inquiry
• Include ongoing and rigorous assessment

It is the requirement to provide opportunities for action which I am most interested in. To be more specific the IB Guideline states: " Provide students opportunites for students to engage in action; students should demonstrate an ability to reflect on and apply their learning to choose appropriate courses of action and carry them out; this action may take the form of personal involvement with the planning and implementation of the exhibition and/or service-orientated action; action may not always be clearly or immediately visible or measurable but evidence should be recorded whenever a particular behaviour results from the learning involved"

Action can take many forms, it does not always need to be service-oriented. In many conversations with teachers there appears a misconception that action reflects only service-orientated action. Taking action with regard to learning is so much more than doing something for a cause. Isn't it enough to ask our 10-11 year old students to take action with regard to their own learning by ensuring that their exhibition is just that - theirs.

An exhibition unit of inquiry should be designed and built by the individual student. Exhibition is different to all other units because it is the student's own unit of inqury. The student takes themself through the unit design process. The student determines the transdisciplinary theme, they nominate the real life issue, they connect the issue back to their theme with relevance and significance. The student  carefully selects the key concepts which drive their inquiry and their questions. The student plans the learning activities and undertakes their in-depth inquiry. The teacher's role as facilitator allows her to support the connections between concepts and themes, which teachers themselves do not always agree on when planning a unit of work, and to support the students' development of the assessment model.

Surely this process is action enough to fulfil the requirement that the "PYP Exhibition must provide opportunities for students to engage in action". Not all PYP units lead to service-oriented action. Why is it then there seems to be an underlying expection of service-oriented action for the PYP Exhibiton?