You already have a lot of questions about this topic. You know a lot, but you know what you don't know and this might just be the opportunity to chase up some of those questions that you have wanted to figure out but haven't had time. This is actually kind of cool, you get to research what you want, AND you get credit for it! But can I get credit for what I want to research, or do I need to do something a little more traditional in order to please the teacher?
I know that I can do a great job if I'm researching something that I actually care about. I run the risk of having to twist things a bit to sell it to the teacher, but I know that it'll be a better paper if I actually care. I'm writing my topic.
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Wait a minute. I know this broad topic pretty well already. I can write a decent paper without actually doing much research at all. I've already done the research. I'm going to play it safe and write what I already know.
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I'd better tow the party line and write what I think that my teacher wants me to write. He was raving about this paper that was written a couple of years ago that looked at this particular aspect of the topic. I'll just write that paper. He seemed to like it and the resources must be easy to get because someone else wrote the paper. Give the teacher what he wants and get a good mark. That's the name of that game!
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This is gold when this happens. When we have an intersection between what the demands of the curriculum are and what the exerience and passions of the student are, we have what is called Third Space (Curriculum is First Space, student knowledge and experience are Second Space). For someone to truly learn anything, they have to be able to put it into the context of what they already know and to be engaged, they have to actually want to learn. When the curriculum strays across the path of a student's self-motivated learning, we end up with a prime learning opportunity. The problem with this scenario is that we did not design it to be this way. We got here by fluke and there is nothing motivating the student to stay here. We cannot recreate this situation with other students, because we didn't design that aspect of the learning in the first place.