Developing and Fostering Passion in Academic and Nonacademic Domains

The purpose of this study was to explore how passion was manifested among gifted and talent youth selected from a larger longitudinal study of child and adolescent development. The gifted sample included 25 high school and college students who were selected because they were in a gifted program in elementary school. The talent sample included 41 high school students who were selected because they were highly involved in athletics and the arts in middle childhood. The authors found that passion was more characteristic of participation in nonacademic activities (i.e., sports and the arts). Talented youth were more likely to talk about wanting to do their activity all the time, experiencing flow, getting emotional release from participation, and internalizing the activity into their identity. The authors also found that school settings, and especially regular classrooms as compared with gifted and advanced classes, appeared to undermine rather that support passion. The authors discuss implications of their findings for creating school environments that can foster passion. Putting the Research to Use We found very little evidence of passion in our interviews with gifted high school and college youth. Instead, most of these youth talked about being bored and that little motivated them besides demonstrating their ability. Unfortunately, many of the youth talked negatively about aspects of both the academic and social environment. We offer suggestions for teachers and schools on how to increase passion in the classroom. Students are more likely to experience passion in environments where they feel supported by peers who are of similar ability and motivation levels, where teachers model enthusiasm and press for understanding, where there is adequate challenge, and where are opportunities to work on varied, meaningful, and cognitively complex tasks.