Biggest lessons and metaphors for passion-based education
Biggest learning:
To me, fostering passion is spatial. Our students, now, have all these platforms to express themselves, show themselves off (facebook updates, Twitter accounts, their fashion, for that matter) and they are empowered through those spaces because through those media and in those spaces they are the experts of themselves. They control those spaces, that they say and do. When you ask them about their passions you are creating a space for them to bring their expertise to the table before learning anything. They don’t feel dumb at the start, you are saying, “you know a lot” let’s share and find a middle ground. When I think about it spatially, I see the class becoming a quilt of experts all sharing different passions but meeting over and discussion a series of overarching themes.
How to foster passion in the classroom
So, now that we’ve established passion as important, how do you foster passion in the classroom?
Let’s start with a few fundamental definitions to understand what passion is:
Passion: strong and barely controllable emotion/ intense desire or enthusiasm for something
Motivation: the general desire or willingness of someone to do something
Drive: the force to work to an excessive extent
I see there to be 2 ways of “getting people to do things” in your class:
1. Externally fostered action
-Motivation (you can motivate people to do things, but once the motivation is taken away, they’ll stop doing it)
-Drive (you can drive people to do things, but drive has a certain connotation of work, toil, labor and pain—E.g.: “driving someone to the brink of madness”)
2. Internally fostered action
-Passion
-When passion is fostered what happens is that you tap into the thing that drives the student in the first place. You tap into the self-fueled source of action. If you can find out what people are passionate about, they’ll explore that passion without you having to push any more.
Listen to these quotes from elementary students, interviewing in a study on passion published in Gifted Children’s Quarterly[1], describing what it feels like to do the things they are passionate about:
I’d dance all day if I could. Forget school, forget dinner, forget everything. (Female, 9th grade, dance)
I love the game. I just, I can’t stop. I just want to play it all the time. (Male, 10th grade, baseball)
I think more than anything else . . . [singing] makes me happy. It’s just like one of those things where you get involved. I am doing it, you know, because I want to not because somebody, you know, forced me into doing it or whatever. (Female, 12th grade, music)
A metaphor for Passion based Learning
If the classic metaphors in education are:
Students are vessels that you pour knowledge into, or
Students are sponges and they suck things up, or
Students are seeds that you water and grow,
What metaphor I think describes passion the best is
Students are perpetual motion machines. Once you tap into the passion, that passion will fuel themselves.
[1] Fredricks, J.A., Alfeld, C., and Jacquelynne S. Eccles. 2010. "Developing and Fostering Passion in Academic and Nonacademic Domains." Gifted Child Quarterly, 54(1): 18-30.
To me, fostering passion is spatial. Our students, now, have all these platforms to express themselves, show themselves off (facebook updates, Twitter accounts, their fashion, for that matter) and they are empowered through those spaces because through those media and in those spaces they are the experts of themselves. They control those spaces, that they say and do. When you ask them about their passions you are creating a space for them to bring their expertise to the table before learning anything. They don’t feel dumb at the start, you are saying, “you know a lot” let’s share and find a middle ground. When I think about it spatially, I see the class becoming a quilt of experts all sharing different passions but meeting over and discussion a series of overarching themes.
How to foster passion in the classroom
So, now that we’ve established passion as important, how do you foster passion in the classroom?
Let’s start with a few fundamental definitions to understand what passion is:
Passion: strong and barely controllable emotion/ intense desire or enthusiasm for something
Motivation: the general desire or willingness of someone to do something
Drive: the force to work to an excessive extent
I see there to be 2 ways of “getting people to do things” in your class:
1. Externally fostered action
-Motivation (you can motivate people to do things, but once the motivation is taken away, they’ll stop doing it)
-Drive (you can drive people to do things, but drive has a certain connotation of work, toil, labor and pain—E.g.: “driving someone to the brink of madness”)
2. Internally fostered action
-Passion
-When passion is fostered what happens is that you tap into the thing that drives the student in the first place. You tap into the self-fueled source of action. If you can find out what people are passionate about, they’ll explore that passion without you having to push any more.
Listen to these quotes from elementary students, interviewing in a study on passion published in Gifted Children’s Quarterly[1], describing what it feels like to do the things they are passionate about:
I’d dance all day if I could. Forget school, forget dinner, forget everything. (Female, 9th grade, dance)
I love the game. I just, I can’t stop. I just want to play it all the time. (Male, 10th grade, baseball)
I think more than anything else . . . [singing] makes me happy. It’s just like one of those things where you get involved. I am doing it, you know, because I want to not because somebody, you know, forced me into doing it or whatever. (Female, 12th grade, music)
A metaphor for Passion based Learning
If the classic metaphors in education are:
Students are vessels that you pour knowledge into, or
Students are sponges and they suck things up, or
Students are seeds that you water and grow,
What metaphor I think describes passion the best is
Students are perpetual motion machines. Once you tap into the passion, that passion will fuel themselves.
[1] Fredricks, J.A., Alfeld, C., and Jacquelynne S. Eccles. 2010. "Developing and Fostering Passion in Academic and Nonacademic Domains." Gifted Child Quarterly, 54(1): 18-30.