Stettler's Significant Objects

Concept

A few years ago I heard about the "Significant Objects Project" from Brenda Dyck here at Teachers' Convention - I decided I wanted to give it a try!


Their website gives the background:

"Significant Objects, a literary and anthropological experiment whose first two phases ran from July 2009 through October 2010, demonstrated that the effect of narrative on any given object’s subjective value can be measured objectively. The project auctioned off thrift-store objects via eBay; for item descriptions, short stories purpose-written by over 200 contributing writers, including Meg Cabot,William Gibson, Ben Greenman, Sheila Heti, Neil LaBute, Jonathan Lethem, Tom McCarthy, Lydia Millet, Jenny Offill, Bruce Sterling, Scarlett Thomas, and Colson Whitehead, were substituted. The objects, purchased for $1.25 apiece on average, sold for nearly $8,000.00 in total. (Proceeds were distributed to the contributors, and to nonprofit creative writing organizations.) The project’s organizers, Rob Walker and Joshua Glenn, are currently working on the third phase: a collection of stories, which will be published by Fantagraphics in April 2012. Phase four will be announced at that time. Enjoy the stories here, and stay tuned!"

After contacting the project co-founders, they gave us the go-ahead to try it out ourselves! And so we began....


Our Project (the "Reader's Digest version")
I built a simple blog for our project: Stettler's Significant Objects while students collected their objects and began writing their stories. This was a true "draft" process. Once their stories were 'polished', we published them to the website. 


The next step was to publish them to our eBay seller's account, to experiment and see if people would find new value in the items because of their stories. Students sold copies of their stories along with the objects. Students could choose to keep 50% of their profit, or donate it to charity along with the other 50%. 


Overall, I had 100% participation from two classes of ELA 20-1 students. It was truly amazing and a "real-life" opportunity for them!

ELA 20-1 Competencies that match with this project (see attached)

Probably the best connection is: " take ownership of text creation, by selecting or crafting a topic, concept or idea that is personally meaningful and engaging" (ELA 20-1, 4.1.3 a) - and this project most definitely achieved this!

Stettler's Significant Objects Book

As a memento for students, they will each receive a copy of a book of all of the stories from this project. It includes the accolades of the project co-founders as well some of the other support and comments we received.