The Proteus Project And The Occasional Paper

By Author: Crystal
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I was introduced to the Proteus Project by Laury Fischer at a Bay Area Writing Project workshop. The Proteus Project, as its name indicates, can take as many forms as there are individual students with a passion to know more about someone or something. It involves primary and secondary research and writing in the no-holds-barred tradition of New Journalism (Wolfe). In its current incarnation, my juniors work on the Proteus Project for the entire year, writing first a nonfiction narrative, then a field study based on the narrative, followed by intercalary chapters and a recurring motif (see fig. 1 for assignment sheets and a rubric). The parts correspond with the readings for the course. For example, the nonfiction narrative follows a summer assignment focused on memoir, and the intercalary chapters are written after students Omega Replica have read The Grapes of Wrath and prior to reading In Our Time, The Proteus Project provides a flexible framework, but it is the exercise of individual imagination that fills that framework with the interwoven threads of the student's ...
... story, findings, associations, visualization, revelations, and reflections.

The Proteus Project was already intuitively multigenre, as it integrates narrative with other patterns of exposition more typical of research papers. The inspiration to make Proteus explicitly multigenre came from an English Journal article by Nancy Mack. In her article Mack discusses in detail the power and possibilities of multigenre writing and concludes by compressing its characteristics into a concise list (see fig. 2).

Mack's list has become part of the handout that I give students when they are about halfway through the Proteus Project and start to see that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. I compensate for the additional time and energy that students invest in the Proteus Project by making it serve as the final exam for the course. An additional advantage of this is that there is no rush to complete a final project or to cram for an exam when we near the end of the academic year. My goal is for all students to earn 100% of the possible points for the project, and most do.

Another assignment that has a significant impact on my students' willingness to truly engage in their writing is the Occasional Paper, which I discovered from an article by Bill Martin in English Journal. The article is called "A Writing Assignment/A Way of Life" and it has certainly become both for my Omega Replica Watches students. The Occasional Paper, or OP, as it is fondly known, is a paper anchored in the quotidian. Already this year there have been OPs about writing utensil preference, PostSecret, switching roles with one's twin, Humpty Dumpty, National Novel Writing Month, and correct urinal behavior, to name just a few. Following Martin's guidelines, the due date for the OP is flexible and the paper is read aloud to the class. Students will sometimes offer me a copy, knowing that I collect samples for future students (and I sometimes beg for a copy), but the paper is not turned in for assessment. The only assessment students receive is the collective gasp or howls of laughter or awed "Wow!" of their colleagues' response; their peers' responses have proven to be a mighty motivator for work that combines critical thinking with imagination. I provide guidelines (see fig. 3) and enter credit for a good faith effort.

Students don't have to worry about the grade when they present their OPs; they have to worry about something much more important: moving a real audience with trenchant observation and artful use of language. Over the course of two or three rounds of OPs, students pick up new strategies, refine their craft both as writers and presenters, deepen their appreciation of their colleagues, and broaden their understanding of the foolishness and the sweetness of the world they inhabit.