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Introduction
> Universe Wiring > Entry: The Personal Creed Project
The Creed Project introduced me to a new style
of learning where I went deeper and studied myself. . . . The
project also taught me a lot about being careful about judging
other people. Some of my classmates who presented were people
I thought I knew, but after listening to them talk about themselves
and what they stand for, I've found that there is so much more
to them than I could have ever imagined.
- Elyse Kirker,
American High School, June 2003
Entry: The Personal Creed Project
Early in my career as a teacher, I fell into creating a learning
experience with my high school sophomores that has gained a life
of its own. Juniors and seniors stop me in the hall early every
spring, peer earnestly, and ask me if this year's sophomores have
started the Creed Project yet. Students who graduated five, even
eight years ago, drop by to visit and soon ask the same question.
Looking through the bins at a Berkeley frame store, I hear a
voice behind me: "Excuse me, aren't you a teacher"?
Turning around, I see a young man standing behind me. I don't
recognize him at first. "Mr. Creger, right? The Personal
Creed Project"! Tim long ago graduated, has now moved for
graduate school to the town where I live. Ten years and thirty-five
miles from the classroom where he encountered an early version
of the project in June of 1993, Tim recognizes me--and this learning
experience is the first thing to pop into his mind.
The Personal Creed Project as my sophomores and I have developed
it over more than a decade is a classroom-based personal rite
of passage. It consists of an accumulating series of personal
reflections on life and purpose, a journey of self-discovery of
a scope few sophomores have undertaken.
Though the project has spread to elementary, middle, high school
and college classrooms around the U.S., most versions to my knowledge
continue to consist of an extended series of interwoven reflections,
culminating in the final week or weeks of the year in a presentation.
In these presentations, students share a creative work that has
grown from their reflections. Standing with this creation before
her peers and teacher during a Creed presentation, a student shares
what the project has helped her realize about herself and her
life, emphasizing in the manner of her choosing the following
basic elements:
- This is who and what have influenced and inspired me to be
the person I am today; and of the array of influences and inspirations
in my life these are the ones I most and least value or admire;
- these are the values, principles or ideals I feel committed
to enough to say I stand for at this point in my life, and this
is why I persist in holding them;
- this is the kind of person (not career) I want to become in
ten years, and this is how I might want to be serving, helping,
or influencing others at that point.
An Asian gang member encountered the project in the year of his
epiphany with his violent lifestyle. He wrote, "One can compare
the Creed Project to a light emerging forth from one's head, and
awakening a person from a coma." Over the past three years,
peering through the window of students' and colleagues' responses
to the Creed Project, collecting and reflecting on many such statements
and classroom moments, I have myself awoken to new insights into
the nature of learning.
To begin articulating these realizations, and to fully explore
with other educators the learning experience that led me to them,
I have launched a series of universeWired workshops, and written
a guidebook, The Personal Creed Project and a New
Vision of Learning: Teaching the Universe of Meaning In and Beyond
the Classroom (Heinemann 2004).
This site is a supplement to the workshops and guidebook, and
a self-contained web-based guide to the Personal Creed Project
and the realizations about learning I continue to find standing
behind it. Part Two of the guidebook develops these realizations
in what I am calling A New Look Toward Learning.
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