Following Passion into Action

PASSION is defined as a STRONG feeling of ENTHUSIASM or EXCITEMENT for something or about DOING something. It's a FIRE that BURNS within that CANNOT be EXTINGUISHED.
Don't follow your heart to find your passion, follow your HEARTBREAK." ~Angela Maiers 
Passion projects are about taking your education into your own hands, finding something you are truly passionate about, and pursuing that interest in a deep and meaningful way. 

So how do you find your passion? Begin by asking yourself these questions:

What do you love doing?
What do you want to create that can make this world a better place?
How can you help others or impact their lives in a positive way?
What do you want to change in the world?
What bothers/upsets you locally/nationally/globally?
What breaks your heart?
What do you want to DO?
Inspiration 

The "Rules"

Rule One: Your passion project must be approved by your classmates and me.
Rule Two: Your passion project must have a driving question or goal. 
Rule Three: Your passion project must involve research.
Rule Four: You must create a product that represents the project and is valuable or useful to others in some way. 
Rule Five: Both your project and your product must be shared beyond the walls of the classroom.

Elements of the Passion Project 

Step One: Discovering an Idea
Inspiration is all around you!! Start with your own interests and curiosities—what have you always wondered about? What do you wish you knew more about or understood better? What are areas of your career field you would like to explore—what new problems or frontiers are there to explore and solve? What are things locally or in the world at large that bother you, that need to be addressed, that you would like to see change? What are things that excite you, sadden you, make you angry? Find something you are passionate and curious about!

Step Two: Framing the Work
  • Pre-pitch: In groups, you will toss around your ideas for what you might want to pursue in this project cycle. You will prepare for your pre-pitch         conversations by answering the following questions (which you may jot down in your notebook):
    • What do you want to write about?
    • Why are you writing about this?
    • Who would be interested in reading this?
    • Why are you the person to write this?
    • What form will this idea take?
  • Pitch: After talking with your group, you will spend a day sketching out and practicing your three-minute pitch by answering the following questions (you can use notecards, if you'd like)
    • What was the genesis or spark of your idea?
    • What genre/form will your project take?
    • What is a brief summary—including the purpose (what you hope to accomplish)--of your project?
    • What are your manuscript goals for the project?
      • A specific measurable amount of time that can be tracked daily, such as word count, page count, number of blog posts, number of poems, number of vlogs, etc.
    • What are your 4P goals (publication, performance, presentation, or production)?
      • In other words, how will you reveal your work to an audience outside of the classroom? Who is your real-world audience?
  • Proposal: After everyone has pitched their projects successfully, you will write a 300-500 word proposal clarifying your final ideas for the writing project. You'll receive more detailed instructions at a later date. You will publish this to your blog (see below).

Step Three: Planning the Work
  • Setting Goals: You will create product-specific goals to reach by the end of the project cycle. We will walk through a handful of activities that help you craft an idea of an end product and write goal statements to ensure that you make it to where you want to get. You will publish your goals to your blog.
  • Scheduling: Once you have an end product in mind and have crafted goal statements to get you there, you will create a schedule that breaks the larger project into small, manageable tasks, including time for researching, outlining, drafting, and revising. I will provide you with a calendar listing all the major deadlines to help you structure your schedule.

Step Four: Doing the Work
You will be engaging in a great deal of studio time, individually directed time to work on your project. Your schedule will help structure this studio time. During this portion of the project cycle, you will be conducting research and developing your project library, writingwritingWRITING, and engaging with me during individual conferences.
  • Project Library: You will build a project library by gathering a minimum of 8 sources to guide the creation of your final product. You will have 1 Model Source, which is an example of what you plan to create (genre); 1 Craft Source, which is a “how to” article for your chosen genre; and 6 Content Sources, which focus on the topic you are researching. In your project library, you will record the MLA works cited entry, a brief summary of the source, and have space to record important quotations.
  • Active Research: In addition to a more traditional idea of research, you will be conducting ACTIVE research; you have two options:
    • Interview: You will locate an “expert” on your topic to interview as part of your passion project. An expert can be someone who has a related degree, works in a field pertinent to your project, or someone who has experience with or is affected or impacted by the topic of focus. The interview must be a minimum of 10 questions, but no more than 20. Your interview must also be documented, either by video, audio, or through transcription, and uploaded to your website.
    • Experience: You will seek out an opportunity to get involved in whatever way is appropriate for your topic. For example, if your topic involves animal shelters, you may arrange to volunteer a few days at a local shelter, like Little Victories. Or if you are looking into hunger, volunteer a few days at a local food bank or soup kitchen. In other words, you create an opportunity to immerse/engage/involve yourself in the world of your research. This experience should be documented with photographs and a written reflection of the experience—all to be uploaded to your website.
  • The Website: You will be designing and developing a fully functioning website through Weebly that will house your entire project.
    • Blog Page—This will function as your Home page. You will be responsible for publishing an original weekly blog post about the progress of your project. For your weekly post, you may write a reflection on what you have learned that week (from research, from working on your product, from your active research, etc.), reflect on conferences with me, and discuss the work you are doing on your product (success, failing, problem solving / troubleshooting, next steps, etc.). Some additional project elements (see calendar) will be required blog posts, in addition to your weekly post.
    • Active Research Page—You will upload the necessary/appropriate documentation for either the interview or experience.
    • Product Page—You will publish your product (or photographs of your product) to your website.
    • Reflection Page—You will publish a thoughtful and thorough reflection about your completed product and the project process. (More information about this later!)

Step Five: Reframing the Work
  • Inquiry Draft/Inquiry Week: You will develop a draft of your final product along with four “inquiry questions” to accompany this draft, that will be submitted to the entire class via your blog. Everyone will read your draft, answer your questions, and discuss you piece during a say-back session (more on this later, too!).

Step Six: Finalizing the Work
  • Processing Feedback: You will compose a brief reflection of the feedback you received from the say-back session and make a plan for revision and development of the product. You will also publish this to your blog.
  • Final Product: You will resubmit your revised/developed version of your project product to the class, along with an Individual Evaluation Form you create based off of your project goals and inquiry questions. You will also compose a project reflection to publish on your website along with your final product.

Step Seven: Revealing the Work
  • Community Score/Presentation: At the close of the project cycle, you will present your final product to the class. Using the IEF you designed, your peers will assess how well you executed your project goals. Your community score will be the average of your peers' scores. You will also use the IEF to evaluate your own work. In addition, I will do the same.
  • Going Public: After the community score process has been completed, you will make what necessary changes you feel need to be made before going public. We will explore a variety of options for you to do one of the following (whatever is most appropriate for your project and best suites your needs): publication, performance, presentation, or production.







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