Continuity and Purpose in the Design of Meaningful Project Work Amy C. McAninch
School of Education
University of Missouri at Kansas City
Abstract
This paper discusses two pitfalls in designing project work. The first is a tendency to design projects with little emphasis on how the subject matter might connect to future studies. The second involves processes and goals of project work: all too often the processes proposed for project work serve goals that are nonexistent, weak, or unrelated to one another; or if strong goals exist, they are served by mundane processes. Because the philosophical foundations of project work reside in progressive education, and in particular in the work of Dewey, this paper focuses on the insights his conception of curriculum has for these pitfalls. In the first section of this paper, Dewey's principle of continuity is examined in relation to the first pitfall and the treatment of subject matter in project work. In the remainder of this paper, goals and processes are considered in light of Dewey's discussion of the concept of purpose. The paper notes that Dewey's theoretical analysis of progressive education suggests that subject matter content, processes, and products are all vital to intelligent activity. The paper also points to the fundamental role that the philosophical foundations of education play in the development of curriculum for young children and the difficulty of implementing progressive pedagogy.
The impetus for this paper is my frustration in helping preservice teacher candidates develop sound plans for project work for the early primary grades. My experience has been that the pitfalls involved in designing project work are at least twofold. First, preservice teacher candidates tend to design projects as islands unto themselves, with little emphasis on how the subject matter might connect to future studies. For example, a project on "China," followed by a project on "Australia," will contain few concepts and understandings connecting the two subjects. If there are concepts that relate one study to the next or subsume both topics, they are all too often implicit, rather than explicit. Thus, while the customs or language particular to each country may be examined as part of project work, children are not helped to think in terms of overarching concepts such as "culture." The consequence is a weakening of the educational value of the project. The second pitfall has to do with the processes and goals of project work. All too often, the processes that preservice teacher candidates propose for project work serve goals that are nonexistent, weak, unrelated to one another, or unclarified. On the other hand, strong goals are frequently served by mundane processes. Here, too, opportunities for learning may be lost. As Katz has pointed out, projects require good content and processes in the service of solid intellectual goals (L. G. Katz, personal communication, December 10, 1999).
Because the philosophical foundations of project work reside in progressive education, and in particular in the work of Dewey (1938), this paper focuses on the insights his conception of curriculum has for these pitfalls. In the first section of this paper, Dewey's principle of continuity is examined in relation to the first pitfall and the treatment of subject matter in project work. In the remainder of this paper, goals and processes are considered in light of Dewey's discussion of the concept of purpose. For the progressives who originally advocated project work, the alienation and intellectual stagnation of 19th-century schooling was to be remedied by the "whole-hearted purposeful activity" of project work (Kilpatrick, 1925, p. 349). Dewey's effort to formulate the principles by which a child-centered and experientially based curriculum can be designed and evaluated makes clear that projects are not merely a pedagogical reform, but more fundamentally they are tied to the cultivation of the kind of intellectual dispositions required of citizens in a democracy. These ideas are examined more fully below, turning first to the "principle of continuity" and its implications for a project curriculum.
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