Off the Beaten Path: Project Work

Hall Houston, Hong Kong

Hall Houston is an English Instructor at City University of Hong Kong, English Language Centre. His first book, The Creative Classroom, was published in 2007 by Lynx Publishing (www.lynxpublishing.com). His professional interests include cross-cultural communication, discourse analysis, creativity and critical thinking. E-mail: hallhouston@yahoo.com

There are many reasons for using project work in the classroom. Projects allow students to interact with the world outside the classroom. Along with helping students improve their linguistic skills, they also help students to develop their creative and critical thinking skills, and to become more self-confident, independent learners.

Fried-Booth (2002) describes the three stages of a project. The first stage is the planning stage. This is where you go over the project with the students, discussing what needs to be done and what their language needs might be. The second stage is the implementation stage. This is where students do the work to complete the project, usually outside the classroom. The third stage is the creation of the end-product. In this stage, students produce something tangible such as a book or a wall display.

Last month, I obtained a couple of amazing books: "52 Projects: Random Acts of Everyday Creativity" by Jeffrey Yamaguchi and "Caffeine for the Creative Mind: 250 Exercises To Wake Up Your Mind" by Stefan Mumaw and Wendy Lee Oldfield. (If you are interested in finding out more about these books, I refer you to the reference list at the end of this article, which also contains links to the author’s websites.) These two titles both contain an impressive assortment of project ideas. However, not every idea in these books are applicable to the language classroom. Some ideas might fit the more ambitious projects described by Fried-Booth, while others work better as warm-ups or fillers.

According to Jeffrey Yamaguchi, the author, "52 Projects" is "an eclectic collection of offbeat, exploratory, artistic projects." Some involve writing, others drawing or photography or even baking. Most projects include several intriguing variations. The book also includes the author’s personal stories which relate to the projects. The end of the book has lots of extra sources of inspiration, including books, movies, and websites. Yamaguchi also lists some tips for making more time to do projects.

Here are a few projects that caught my eye:

• Write about why you moved to the city you live in now.
• Read up about the art and life of an artist you are interested in.
• Write your autobiography, in one minute. Then repeat the exercise several times.
• At the end of the day, record yourself narrating the highlights of your day.
• Fill up an envelope with all kinds of clippings (poems, newspaper articles, pictures, letters, recipes, artwork, etc.). Send it off to a close friend.
• Take a photo every day for an entire month. Then put the pictures in an album in chronological order. (And watch the movie Smoke.)

"Caffeine for the Creative Mind" is written for graphic designers, although it contains many activities that could easily be used for people in other areas. Each creative activity takes up a page. Some of them are supplemented with "I Tried It!", testimonials from people who tried the activity. Another feature of the book is interviews with successful graphic designers. There’s an exciting mix of activities that involve everything from drawing to writing to photography.

A few choice creative exercises from this unique book:

• Create new hand gestures for some common expressions or sayings.
• Think of ten different uses for phone booths, other than for making phone calls in.
• Imagine you are teaching a group of second-graders and have to make up a game for them. You have only these items: a roll of duct tape, a small rubber ball, three shoe boxes, a broom, a box of action figures, some children’s books, the class turtle, and a box of marbles.
• Sketch an action figure for yourself and add a slogan and packaging ideas to promote it.
• Think of 20 ways to make hardware stores more attractive to female customers.
• Create a reality TV show based on your workplace or school. Describe how contestants are chosen, what they must do to compete, and how they are eliminated from the show.

If some of these ideas appeal to you, think of how you could use one of them with your class. Plan how you would introduce the project to students and what their language needs would be. And if you do project work with your students, why not write an article about it and send it to Humanising Language Teaching?

References

Fried-Booth, D.L. 2002, Project Work, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Mumaw, S., and Oldfield, W.L. 2006, Caffeine for the Creative Mind: 250 Exercises to Wake Up Your Mind, Cincinnati: How Books.

Caffeine for the Creative Mind website, www.wakeupmybrain.com

Yamaguchi, J. 2005, 52 Projects: Random Acts of Everyday Creativity, New York: Perigee.

52 Projects website www.52projects.com

Please check the Secondary Teaching course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Creative Methodology for the Classroom course at Pilgrims website.