TL;DR:  Desire paths can be laid over mandatory paths.

I taught grades 8-12 for ten years and university general education classes for another fifteen. One of the ideas I used in every class was to show learners how to apply something we did in class that day to their own “desire path” .  I do this with super conventional teaching tools like the much despised research paper. I try to make the learner’s desire path form the core of the “line of flight” they have to travel as they complete their projects. They choose the research question they want to answer as well as the format they want for answering it. This desire path flies over the same set of tracks we oftentimes regard as the only way. Not. What I mean is that “my way or the highway” has no place here. Instead it is: your way is the highway.

This idea is not new to me, but I have been practicing them in my own freshman comp classes. For example, I have three students this semester who are choosing to answer their research questions via podcasting. That’s their desire path.  It is a more rigorous format by far from the “normed-out” research paper of their high school days.  One wouldn’t think that they, strategic students to a one,  would voluntarily choose a harder row to hoe, but every semester I get students who do the risk assessment and find that a podcast or a YouTube channel/playlist or a handbook is a happier choice. I think more learners would choose these alternate desire paths if they only trusted themselves more.  One of the greatest sins of high stakes testing is that it has driven curiosity and risk taking out of the classroom and replaced it with fear.  Most students no longer come to me with any habits of mind for curiosity.  I have to reteach them to trust me and more importantly to trust their own curiosity.  Think about this.  Something as natural as being curious has to be re-integrated into my learners’ mental schema.  I prefer to think of those schema as being withered muscles that we can rebuild.

Here is Adam Savage talking about “desire paths” in this episode of “Tested“ his YouTube channel.  The term “desire path” comes from Roman Mars’ podcast “99% Invisible”.