Project Narrative:
During the ISU production of Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play (Feb. 17-25), we will collect donations for a local
service organization (THE 152 students are currently researching which one). To draw attention to our
service project, we’re going to display a “Sacrifice Quilt” in the Center for Performing Arts during the run
of the play. Students in 101 and in THE 152 will design memes that combine an easily recognizable
(non-copyrighted) image with an image/phrase/emblem from each student’s personal engagement with
sacrifice. We will print these memes onto fabric squares; we’ll connect all of the squares into one large
quilt. The quilt will speak more directly to the theme of sacrifice and how individual sacrifices might
better enter the public imagination through the genre of memes. Students will also create and maintain
a Facebook page; “friends” to our site will learn about the play and the organization we will help. They
will also be encouraged to submit links to blogs, personal webpages, and personal narratives that
explore diverse themes of sacrifice. Participants will also be encouraged to write briefly about their link
on Facebook. Thus, the Facebook page will serve as a kind of “virtual sacrifice quilt.”
Goals:
1. Get people involved with the idea of sacrifice and giving of themselves for others.
2. Offer recognition to personal sacrifice through the descriptions, images, and narratives
illustrated in the memes and in the Facebook link.
3. Get people to consider how, even though people will sacrifice in specific ways, acts of sacrifice
are connected by larger narratives about the greater good.
4. Raise money for a local service organization.
5. Educate our Facebook audience about a number of service organizations they might not know
about.
Why Are We Doing this?
We want to explore what sacrifice means. In Ruhl’s play is about actors who put on the Passion Play in
three historical periods; as they practice the play, they discover more about themselves. They consider
what each needs to sacrifice, and how their sacrifices can resonate in different time periods. The play
means different things to different actors as they confront specific conflicts (abortion, Anti-Semitism,
homelessness, war). Today, people make sacrifices for a number of causes: Habitat for Humanity, halfway houses, PETA, specific churches, “Spread the Word to End the Word.” We want to think about and
create a genre about how these individual causes are connected through larger stories like the story of
Jesus, stories of the Revolutionary War, the story of Martin Luther King, Jr., and others.
Collaboration:
We are collaborating with Cristen Susong’s THE 152 “Experiencing Theatre” class. Professor Susong’s
class is researching our target organization. We hope to know more about the organization (and specific
goals for the service learning part of our project) by Feb. 2.
Audience:
Our Audience for the actual quilt is students at ISU who attend the play as well as students who walk by
the Center for Performing Arts (they can see it through the windows.). The audience for our virtual
sacrifice quilt on Facebook is much more open. Anyone who friends us is our audience. We hope that
many students, faculty, and administrators (like Al Bowman) friend our site, as well as people don’t
attend ISU.
Our class will benefit from seeing how individual causes can be connected. The organization we sponsor
will be helped through donations (money, food, clothing, etc.). We hope that everyone who sees the
quilt will stop and think about their relationships to sacrifice. Hopefully our Facebook page helps people
get involved in specific causes (both the one we raise donations for and other causes that people post
about). We also hope that individuals who sacrifice feel recognized by our Facebook page.
We hope that members of our target audience who post on our Facebook virtual sacrifice quilt will
share authorship with us.
Feedback/Assessment
We will feel successful if:
1.
2.
3.
4.
We raise a decent amount of money for our service organization
We are friended by a lot of people on Facebook and receive positive comments on the page.
Our project is recognized in the Vidette, the Pantagraph, or other media outlets.
We get a lot of people to post their links to our Facebook page.
GRWJ?
Obviously we can’t submit the quilt. However, we hope to send pictures of the quilt to the GRWJ. Some
of us might choose to send our personal essays to the GRWP. We also might collect responses from our
Facebook page to submit so that future 101 students can see how a genre like Facebook can encourage
co-authorship and promote student research.