Project-Based Curriculum

Project-based curriculum represents an ideological framework and a practical approach to how classroom inquiry may be enacted. Within project-based curricula, students engage in studying authentic problems or issues centered on a particular project, theme, or idea. Often the term project-based curricula is used interchangeably with problem-based curricula, especially when classroom projects focuses on solving authentic problems. The nexus for the project may be suggested by a teacher, but the planning and execution of contingent activities are predominantly conducted by students working individually and cooperatively over many days, weeks, or even months. This type of curricular method is inquiry-based, outcome-oriented, and associated with conducting curriculum in real-world contexts that are related to naturalistic endeavors rather than focusing on curriculum that is relegated to book or rote learning and memorization. Assessment of project-based curricula is commonly performance-based, flexible, varied, and continuous.

Project-based curriculum challenges the often-prescribed scope, sequence, direct-instruction, and disciplinarity commonly linked to traditional schooling. As a result of its reliance on actual context in natural settings, project-based curriculum is often hands-on, emergent, evolutionary, and focused on integrated endeavors that are interdisciplinary or cross-disciplinary. The organic and experiential aspects of project-based curricula promote knowledge, skills, behaviors, and dispositions through rigorous learning structured in such ways that it may be transferred to other situations and contexts in school, or in one's own life. As a result, project-based curriculum is relevant to the immediate participants in classroom endeavors as it resists banking conceptualizations of education. Project-based learning nurtures student-centered environments that are outcome-oriented, yet situated in learners' lives, and learners are focused more on understanding than on regurgitation. In this sort of curriculum, students confront an issue where there is more than one possible solution. Once a project or an issue is identified, students are provided the space and opportunity and challenged with the responsibility to analyze, discuss, and work together to solve a problem or work through a multidimensional project that ties multiple or all the disciplines of knowledge into one cohesive unit of study. Because of the comprehensive nature of project-based curricula, the issues associated with a particular project provide rigorous content that can be aligned to state standards, but is taught while focusing on what interests and motivates students in a low-stakes setting.

Within the field of curriculum studies, the trajectory of ideas related to project-based curriculum began with the concern of how teaching and learning should be conducted in schools. Both the framework and teaching method stemmed largely from the broad question of what was or should be the role of school in society during the Progressive Era. Project-based curriculum, therefore, is rooted in the U.S. progressive education movement of the 1920s and 1930s because during this time the great debate of how school curricula should be enacted was at full force. Questions surrounding progressive educational ideals, whether school should be reflective of these ideals, and societal [Page 691]demands during this time pushed multiple dimensions of how project-based curriculum could serve communities and the needs of the U.S. public through schooling.

Early theorists in the field of curriculum studies provide much guidance for current conceptualizations of project-based curriculum, although these practices have certainly flourished beyond the curriculum studies field in many realms of education. John Dewey notably discussed the importance of experiences in learning and the progressive nature of subject matter that focused learning beyond a traditional, simplistic, and subject-area relegation. William H. Kilpatrick contributed to this teaching phenomenon through his proposal of “The Project Method” in the early part of the 20th century. Kilpatrick sought to discover a concept that would interconnect various elements and processes of education and life while focusing on students' actions through what he deemed purposeful acts that furthered moral responsibility. Other curriculum studies scholars' work in the areas of how best to enact curriculum had a great affect on current incarnations of project-based curriculum. Some of these scholars include L. Thomas Hopkins, Joseph Schwab, Paulo Freire, and James Beane.

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