Does “Passion-based Learning” have to be “Digital”?
Attributed to John Seely Brown, the term “passion-based learning” jumped out at me as I read the course assignment on “Reinventing Project Based Learning. For years, when I’ve met with IB students beginning their Extended Essay, a 4000 word research paper on a topic of their choice, I’ve exhorted them to “pick a topic that they’re passionate about”.
“This is your chance,” I tell them, “to finally investigate something that YOU are interested in. For some of you, this will be your first opportunity to actually research something you care about. Don’t waste the opportunity!”
Just because we want students to follow their passions, though, it doesn’t necessarily follow that they must use digital tools to do so. More than one IB Extended Essay in the past three years has achieved a respectable score with almost NO reliance on digital resources. In one example, the student pored over current examples of graphic novels and then fashioned a thesis, entirely of her own creation, which she successfully defended in her paper. In another, a student read just two of Stephen King’s works, along with the works of another contemporary novelis, and then compared their probable motivations and the resulting literary devices they used – once again, with no reliance on digital resources.
Next week, I have the good fortune to be able to join our Week Without Walls Jewelry trip. During this week, when many ISB students will be off on overseas adventures from Russia to Australia, 20 ISB students will be staying at home to create a small piece of jewelry using the “lost-wax” technique, where they sculpt something unique from a block of wax resin, and have the result cast in silver.
Although not every student who has ended up in Jewelry as their “Week Without Walls” trip is passionate about this experience, I had the good fortune to meet a student last week, who IS passionate about this experience. Although he is will be off on another adventure himself next week, he showed me a sampling of the unique creations he has fashioned in two semesters of Jewelry at ISB. I will follow this post up with photos of this student’s work, but for now, since I didn’t get pictures when I first saw the work, I’ll need to just describe some of his pieces, which include;
- a pair of miniature, fully functioning crossbows, each about 3 inches long. One fires a small dart that the student fashioned along with the crossbow, while the other fires a standard sewing needle. “Violent tendencies”, I hear you say, but the precision, the attention to detail and the purely tactile skill necessary to create these miniature marvels is a perfect example of a student following a passion to learn to its logical conclusion
- a tiny (about an inch and a half long) silver semi-automatic handgun. Although this one is non-operational in that it doesn’t shoot anything, the slide functions, the trigger operates, and the handgrips are tricked out in tiny hand-carved cherry-wood grips. Again, I hear the rumblings about the fascination with engines of destruction that his choice of subject suggests, but once again, the student’s attention to detail, manifested in the precision with which he fashioned this tiny artifact, is nothing short of amazing.
What’s the one defining characteristic of the students in these four examples – aside from the fact that they were all passionate about the work in which they were engaged, and they all developed new skills in the course of the experience which led to the creation of something unique and new (an original theses or a unique piece of jewelry) which made the (constructivist) learning authentic, since, in each case, it has helped them move further along the career path they have chosen.
Simply put, neither these, nor ANY of the projects that the 30 students taking the Jewelry course next week will create, requires a SINGLE digital skill. In spite of the fact that the “Project-based Learning” article states baldly that “Authentic projects involve digital resources”, this is simply NOT true for every learning experience that a 21st-century student may encounter.There are still learning experiences for which good old-fashioned “hands-on” learning is still best.
Call me old-fashioned, if it reinforces your conception that “digital” is the new chic. For me, it’s about using digital tools when they offer a clearly better learning option – but using digital options as additive, rather than an alternative, learning tools.
