The Personal Creed Project and a New Vision of Learning: Teaching the Universe of Meaning in and beyond the Classroom » (New Edition)

An English teacher at American High School in Fremont, California, John Creger is the recipient of NCTE/NWP's James Moffett Memorial Award for Teacher Research in recognition of the Personal Creed Project. His article on the two-legged interweaving of academic and personal learning appeared in the February 2002 issue of California English. Originator of the popular universeWired workshop series for educators, he can be reached at www.universeWired.com.

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.

	Preface
	Acknowledgments
	Introduction
1	The central and indispensable lack	3
2	Class transformations	10
3	Teacher transformations	19
4	Individual transformations	29
5	The core evolutionary process	43
6	The person missing	49
7	The learning continuum	53
8	Goals for 21st-century teaching and learning practices	58
9	Overview and planning	71
10	Introducing the project	89
11	Steps I and II	99
12	Steps III and IV	119
13	Step V : the presentations	134
14	Life, literature, and the two-legged pursuit of learning	155
	Afterword	185
App. I	Creed Project materials	192
App. II	Wisdom Project materials	214
App. III	Materials for weaving personal learning through the year	227
	References	231
	Index	233