Let's Evolve PBL
Project based learning is really good teaching and learning with a lineage of educators and pedagogues who have given it shape and definition for the current moment. However, it could be so much better. I want to share what I feel are the limits of project based learning and ways that it could evolve to meet contemporary needs.
Love: First let me share why I love it. I love project based learning because it incorporates all the ideals for 21st century learning, collaboration, creativity, critical thinking, and communication. It opens the window for the depth of thinking and knowledge that we hope all students to reach. I love it because there are endless possibilities for what can be studied and how. I love it because it is real, meaningful, and engaging.
Observe: Here’s what I observe or notice about project based learning. PBL is usually taught within time limits, maybe a week, maybe two weeks at best. Collaborative structures often don’t interrogate power dynamics amongst students. Students who belong to the dominant racial group are often leads of a shared project and often make executive decisions retaining a power structure for access and leadership. PBL is often hindered by access to equipment, limited creative capacity due to underdeveloped skills, and it’s often pushed to the corners of the academic calendar when teachers have additional procedures to get through (like testing and grading), or are extraordinarily tired. This is in an effort to offer engaged learning but lends itself to fall short of spectacular.
Value: I deeply value the long history of project based learning that is deeply rooted in the observation of how humans have learned best throughout time.. by doing! Didactic forms for learning can expand our knowledge on subject matter but experiencing it places that learning in an entirely different mode of understanding. For example, I’ve been learning how to sail during this very difficult year. We were told to read a rather large textbook on sailing before we actually got on the boat. Having never sailed before it was like traveling to a new country where I didn’t know the language, customs, norms, or systems. Reading about them primed my brain but getting out on the boat enabled me to have an embodied understanding of all the parts of the boat, how they work together, how to read the ocean, the wind, and the world around me. This is the power behind project based learning, a transfer from knowing about something to understanding it.
Evolve: It’s time to evolve project based learning. What if project based learning was about one core idea that was studied for an entire year? What if children were curious about the ocean and were able to explore it by building “life sized” submarines, turned their classrooms into underground ocean playgrounds, or put their eye towards understanding bioluminescence by making artful masterpieces that depict the science behind it? There is a role for creative inquiry in project based learning that often gets ignored. If led well, project based learning does allow for student inquiry. But many of us haven’t yet mastered creative inquiry as an approach to a more fulfilling and liberatory learning experience.
I see a bright future for learning that is racially just, centers creativity and the arts, and addressed the narratives that have been harmful to most learners over time. Teaching that employs creative inquiry may feel like a lift in the beginning but over time lightens the burden of the bureaucratic demands put upon us as teachers. It leaps beyond standards, and feels more joyful and love based because it is more culturally responsive and serves the social emotional needs of our learners if held well. Our students deserve more than standards. They deserve the world. Let’s see what we can do!
Teachers explore cyanotype photography to extend project based learning through generative topics such as Weather, the Solar System, Light and the Natural World