The Personal Creed Project and a New Vision of Learning: Teaching the Universe of Meaning in & Beyond the Classroom

By John Creger and Sheridan Blau

Book Overview

The Personal Creed Project is a classroom-based rite of passage that English teacher John Creger has developed over the past ten years with his sophomore classes. Recognized by NCTE as an invaluable resource for teachers of the English language arts and now being adapted in elementary, middle, and high schools as well as universities around the country, the Creed Project invites students to interrelate the facts, meanings, and values that inform their personal lives with their academic learning, making possible a quality of engagement rarely seen in traditional learning. Indeed, Creger advocates creating a parallel personal leg of curriculum that challenges educators to devote as much care and expertise to promoting students' personal learning as they do to developing their academic skills.

In this book, Creger describes exactly how the Creed Project fits into his English course, and how it can fit into and benefit yours. Along the way, as his students do with theirs, he takes on his own "Big Questions," inquiring into the central aim of learning and what it is about the Creed Project that makes teachers and students so excited. His book provides: a provocative and refreshing exploration into the nature of learning a careful unfolding of the theory, grounded in the later thinking of James Moffett, upon which his practice is built new perspectives and terms to empower the classroom a "Two-Legged Learning" design approach, interweaving the academic and personal easy-to-understand graphic representations of ideas and strategies step-by-step instructions to bring the Creed Project to life in your classroom a flexible organization to allow for differing reading or study approaches a consideration of how students of color, African-American students in particular, might benefit from adaptations of the Creed Project a rich cross-section of student voices-from the most disengaged to the most brilliantly high-achieving-eagerly endorsing this personal design for learning a related website, www.universeWired.com, with downloadable support materials for the Personal Creed Project and Two-Legged Learning, along with student writings and related items of interest. With this guidebook in hand, you can put the Personal Creed Project into practice in your classroom-and, even better, in your students' lives long after.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0325006660
• ISBN13: 9780325006666
• Release Date: March 2004
• Publisher: Heinemann Educational Books
• Length: 236 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.1" x 9.0"
• Grade Range: Grades 7 to 12

Customer Reviews

This Is What We Need Now

by Gurupreet Khalsa, NBCT Most of us don't spend much time analyzing our lives, examining wisdom, or articulating values, personal goals, or influences on our world view. The opportunity for high school students to spend a school year investigating the concept of wisdom and then to determine their stance in the world by analyzing and demonstrating how their views coalesce into a personal creed is one not to be missed. John Creger's book, The Personal Creed Project and a New Vision of Learning: Teaching the Universe of Meaning In & Beyond the Classroom, provides a rationale and a means for doing just that. From the beginning of this book, I was hooked. Creger, a staunch fan of James Moffett, argues for personally rewarding learning. I'm a fan, too, of figuring out ways to make school meaningful for students and teachers in the face of "walls of measurement" inhibiting personal growth for the sake of "skills." Often, school is a fight between students yearning for freedom or purpose and systems bent on shaping them to fit a conforming model. Most classrooms ask students to leave their inner selves in their lockers. Adolescents are all about figuring out who they are and how they fit into larger schemes of family, community, nation, world. School should be a place to explore those relationships, but sadly, teens are often left floundering on their own, stuck with popular media's ideas about the world. Thus, many students leave school with weak personal foundations on which to build. Creger claims that this lack is going to contribute to the downfall of democracy, because when people don't know what they stand for, and then stand for it, freedom suffers. With very good support, he works a theory of learning tied to the moral advancement and personal unfolding of society's members, which is the only way that a nation built on freedom can sustain. He proposes methods by which education can become "growth-centered" rather than "skills-centered." Creger's book is as much about the need for an entirely different philosophical approach to education as it is a description of an ennobling project. He is right in thinking, along with Moffett, whom he quotes extensively, that a new perception of learning is necessary, far beyond the partial or piecemeal, reactionary or progressive fixes we have repeatedly implemented. Historically there has been a dangerous waffling in educational reform, a tendency to retreat to the security of a policy-bound system fraught with rules and measurements, rather than embarking on an uncharted journey into the hearts and souls of America's teens with a view towards awakening their inner spirits. Creger has provided one way for teachers to begin such a journey. The constantly swinging pendulum of school "reform," he claims, can be steadied and exchanged for true forward movement by incorporating what he calls "two-legged" learning: learning that embraces both academic and personal goals, or, as he labels it, cultural and consci

Educating the Heart as Well as the Mind

This is a highly important book, and one that has served many teachers, students, and thinkers about education exceedingly well. We live in a time in which there is a lot of "progressive" education that is mushy and thoughtless, which has almost invited upon itself the tsunami of intentionally REGRESSIVE education that is now senselessly punishing the world's children, and deadening the very minds and hearts that most need awakening in these perilous times. John Creger has discovered a sensible and clear method for eliciting the souls of his students, a systematic curriculum for the heart that sees the essential connection between thinking and feeling. Walt Whitman once said, "Produce great persons. The rest follows." Creger's Personal Creed Project has produced classrooms full of great persons, year after year (with, inevitably, a few jealous and uncomprehending exceptions, as can be witnessed in the few resentful reviews below). Imagine the democracy, the world, we might have, if such as project were successfully standardized, as only mindless and heartless education have succeeded in being up to now. Your reading this book is the first step in that process!

Success

Creger's Creed Project is a wonderful idea. It helps develop students' analytical and writing skills, as every writing project does, and furthermore enables profound introspection and self-evaluation. All the while, students relate their own experiences with ones they have read about, further familiarizing them with world literature. I would hands-down reccomend every 10th-grade English teacher to assign their own Creed Project.

Hands down the best book on education you can buy.

If you think the status quo is good enough, if you think that our educational system only needs some minor tweaking to get it to where we want it, if you're pretty much satisified with the way things are done today, then this book is NOT for you. If you want to see real change in education and not just more blah blah blah about boosting academic scores and test performance, if you think that jobs and money are only part of why kids need an education but not the whole enchilada, if you believe that there must be something better, more significant, and more beautiful to life than what we normally dish up in the classroom, then get, read, and apply this book. Your students will thank you. You will be an educational radical and not just falling in with the sleepy sheep who punch a time clock and gripe about "the system" but don't do anything about it. Well here's your chance to do something, and to be someone. Take it. And do yourself a favor; do "the creed" along with your students. Wake up.

Reflection

The Personal Creed Project gives oneself a path to settle down and reflect on the past years. It is truly an eye-opening experience, for how many people actually do that - sit down and think about their actions and their lives up until that point? A book that talks of a date with the self - fabulous.