Teaching by projects; a basis for purposeful study

Front matter

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Table Of Contents

CHAPTER VAGZ

I. Projects in the School 1-17

II. Examples of Complete Projects . . . 18-43

CHAPTER I PROJECTS IN THE SCHOOL Projects are of two kinds

First, the child's project undertaken at his own behest when he is pressed by a felt desire or need, e.g. xwo classes the bird house, the rabbit trap, a homemade o^P'oiects telephone.

Secondly, the projects of others which the child appropriates, into which he is easily drawn, and to which he gives his undivided attention, as the invention of the cotton gin, the planning of a canal lock, or improving the harbor of San Francisco; or he is absorbed in Crusoe's projects of cave-making, boat-building, and taming of animals.

There is a wide range to the first kind of self -chosen projects that a child falls upon, from doll dresses, sleds, treehouses, or camping trips, to the dramatizing of a tale and even the writing of a story or poem. There is a still wider scope and bigness to the projects of the second class that he appropriates from without, and both sorts happily open the way into important school studies. Even a child's games show how easily he passes beyond his own small projects to those of his elders, as in hunting, gardening, and house building. He participates freely in the projects of men exploring new regions, as Boone and Fremont; or Fulton building and exhibiting the first steamboat; or Captain

Eads constructing the jetties to open a deep passage at the mouth of the Mississippi. These projects which men and women, active in the world, are pushing to completion, are appropriate and engaging subjects for young people who are just opening their eyes to the big things in life, as, Livingstone opening up Central Africa, the Red Cross busy in rehef work, Cornell founding a university for the people, New York City constructing its huge aqueduct from the Catskills for supplying its vast population with water. Industrial and scientific projects in mining, in agriculture, and in sanitation are the choice enterprises for children. Even big government projects in irrigation and canal construction engage the mind in genuine thought problems.

In the impulse to adjust themselves to the larger world, children find themselves involved in these important projects whether developed in the past or now opening up in life about them.

Educationally considered, we believe a child is at his best when planning and executing his own projects, or at Value of least those which engage his full powers. Adult projects j^Q^ ^^^ women also in active undertakings are at their best when working out effectively important business and other projects. Even society, in its larger organizations, is at its best when engaged energetically in developing and executing social projects. In all these cases the project has the merit of a self-directed organization of mental and physical resources to achieve a well-considered result. The larger projects of adult life and of social and industrial progress have the additional merit that they tax the serious thought powers of children. They are real problems resting upon a practical basis of life experience.

They also stimulate and require a sustained effort in thinking.

Whether the child is engaged in his self -chosen project or makes his own some bold and difficult undertaking of another, the motive and energy of thought are much the same. The project itself is a natural summons to ambition and effort, an impulsive forward movement in purposeful thinking, and yet objective, and oftentimes even dramatic and spectacular. These project-problems, expressing the strain of thought and effort to master the forces of environment, lead more directly into life conditions as they are than any other studies.

There is a close and necessary connection between the self-chosen projects of the child's small world and the large projects of the life beyond. The smaller problems are a prelude to the major ones soon to follow, to which they are so closely akin in motive and in spirit. Children should be induced to work out as many of these self -chosen projects as may be feasible in order that they may take on the problem-solving attitude with respect to the larger, more complex problems whose solution may be thought out.

It is a truism of our educational creed that sensory impressions based on object lessons and motor response form the primary basis of thought in dealing with the later materials of knowledge. The project conceived and executed by the child on the ground of his own experience is a still better basis for our educational efforts because it sets up in children self-determination and purposeful activity in a complete, natural, and well-rounded unit of effort. This kind and quality of constructive thought can be carried forward into later studies and into life as a fundamental method of exploring, organizing, and using knowledge.

The object of a good course of study is to allow the children to grow into and identify themselves with the enterprising projects which men, past and present, have found most essential to their welfare and progress. The child's own little projects are very essential beginnings in this fundamental process of appropriating and using knowledge and experience directed by himself toward useful ends. The best devices of instruction may be turned into this channel where children are led to the self -appropriation of those larger projects in which wiser heads, active in the world, set their chief store.

While the larger projects of the world just outside of the school have a powerful attraction for children, it is of equal Growth importance to repeat and emphasize the approach fromindi- to these projccts out of the child's experience so social that the projects of his own making grow into the

projects larger schemes of life. Contact with life at both ends is essential, first in a rich child environment, and secondly in a richer, better-organized social environment beyond the school walls. The world's experience and wisdom are gathered up and organized into these successful projects. They express the growing stages, the actual evolution of the main life processes in a practical world.

In pljang his trade among school children the teacher must be a full master of both kinds of experience, the individual and the social, constantly playing back and forth between the two, establishing thus that steady continuity of growth into a larger experience which makes education all of one piece.

On this basis it is necessary for the teacher to study the big world and its dominating projects quite as closely as the child, his tendencies, and activities. This cannot be called an easy program for the teacher. But it is at least an opportunity to sound the depths of our real problem of education and to turn our effort into the main current of progress in the teaching art.

The term project belongs in one sense to the language of business, — or of plans and schemes in active life. It is an echo |rom a noisy world, an intrusion upon the ^^.^^^^^ ^^ quiet of the school, like a sharp train whistle or a fleet real noisy street wagon. But our drowsy school work may need this influx of noise and disturbance from without. At any rate the school is being brought into sharp contact with real life. In the school program itself, the children are learning to understand and adjust themselves to life surroundings and to take in the full meaning of the schemes and forces that are shaping society outside of the school.

In taking over these life projects and adopting them into a plan of instruction as units of thought and effort, we find in them two striking qualities that fit the needs of teaching. First, they are objective and practical, not theoretical and vague. Big projects like the power plant at Muscle Shoals, the Panama' Canal, or the jetty improvements at the mouth of the Mississippi stand out as commanding objects of attention. They are worth an examination. Secondly, such a real undertaking establishes a center of purposeful effort which develops rapidly into a fruitful, progressive subject of study. Aroimd this definite, tangible center the materials of knowledge begin to collect and organize and thought has plenty of stuff to work upon.

The term project as we are using it has a wide scope and is applicable to a variety of undertakings in several important studies. It may be worth while to particularize in some detail the wide range of capital projects which the school may now find profitable as standard units of mental effort.

First : There are simple, objective projects of the hand-work type. We are familiar with them in the larger and smaller Shop and Constructions of the shops, for example, in home proj- textile fabrics, in wood work, in book binding and printing, in pottery, and in nmny related home undertakings such as repairs, reconstructions, and sanitary appliances. To the same group belong plans for school and home gardening, agriculture and fruit growing;, chicken raising, dairying, and other specialties. The household arts supply another group of definite projects in laundering, sewing^ cooking, and millinery, in house decollation and f urnishiag. In some schools there is a tendency to extend school credits to these home enterprises and accomplishments. These shop-and-farm and household projects have both a marked educational value, and a clear, practical utility. They require a distinct forethought in planning and designing, resourcefulness in meeting new and, untried situations, persistent purpose and industry in executing plans, and, finally, a proper use of the results or products. Not many school exercises of the old stripe combine in one strong series of efforts all these merits and advantages.

Secondly : The study of geography supplies a profusion of big, tangible projects of conspicuous importance in human Industrial affairs, as projects in bridge construction, in railmCTdfO^' road engineering and mountain tunneling, in projects expensive mining operations, in the survey and building of canals, in dealing with extensive forest reserves, in planning city waterworks and reservoirs, in irrigation schemes on a large scale, in installing great water powers at dams and falls in rivers, in laying ocean cables, in building subways, in improving harbors, in regulating rivers bylevees and jetties, m the drainage of swan;p areas, in great corporations for the conduct of business on a vast scale, as steamship companies and railroad systems. We are now discovering that these large municipal, governmental, and industrial projects are in themselves complete and well-organized units of study, the best sort of standard topics for schoolroom instruction. The school can well turn its attention to these enterprises because they are so largely shaping life about us ; they are dominant in their influence upon the occupations, the homes and surroundings of thousands and millions of our people. They are the things that children desire to know and understand. Experiments in the full school-treatment of these topics have also demonstrated that they have a peculiar suitability to the thinking power and interest of children.

In another and quite different way nature herself works out on a large scale projects which we study in geography, as the sculpturing of a river valley, the work of a mountain glacier, the course and influence of an ocean current, the regular circulation of winds and moisture upon the earth, the course and movements of a cyclonic storm. These may be called natural units of study, displaying nature's big patterns or designs, by which she works out her projects in making the earth a fit dwelling place for man.

Thirdly : A third group of projects has a more distinctly scientific origin. Inventions and discoveries based upon scientific principles are embodied in steam r. • * •

\ ^ Projects m

engines, wireless stations, power plants, great applied telescopes, electric motors, mining and smelting processes, lightning rods, hydrostatic presses, steam dredges, and water filters. Scientific processes also are applied to the ventilation of buildings, to hospital and surgery practice, to the propagation of plants, the extraction and preservation of foods, to the fertilizing of soils, to the bacterial treatment of diseases, to quarantine and sanitation. AppHed science is full of big, comprehensive projects for turning scientific knowledge into use in commerce, in war, in aviation, in agriculture, in animal husbandry, in navigation, in the extraction and use of metals, in electrical appliances, and in medicine.

It is in these very projects, objective and directly practical in their bearings, that children are best able to see the meaning and value of modern science in its influence upon life. What children in elementary schools need is not abstract scientific principles, not the systematic study of any or all the sciences (an impossible thing), but simple, objective, convincing demonstrations of the main ideas and uses of science in the home and neighborhood and in the larger world beyond. What could be better for children than to allow them to see these tangible projects developing and working out their proper, practical influence upon the conditions of life that surround them ? These are preeminently needful and instructive topics that should be given the right of way in the elementary curriculum.

Fourthly : Many of the stories and undertakings described in biography and history are large personal or national . projects in the full meaning of the term. For biography example, Columbus' first voyage, the Panama istory Q^j^oi^ Alexander's first campaign into Asia, St. Paul's missionary journeys. Grant's movement against Vicksburg, the Lewis and Clark expedition up the Missouri and across the mountains, the voyage of the Mayflower,

PROJECTS IN THE SCHOOL g

Livingstone's explorations in Africa. In a large interpretation, history consists of an account of men's important projects in the building of cities, in the founding of states, in legislative programs, in reform movements, in founding institutions and societies, in warlike conquest, in territorial expansions, in the development of traJQ&c routes and commercial policies. Especially in the story of leading historical characters do we find the personal impulse strong to execute some scheme or propagandist idea, some notion of progress, as illustrated in Hamilton's plan for funding the national debt, Field's project for la)dng the first Atlantic cable, Stanley's search for Livingstone, Howard's scheme of prison reform, Franklin's proposed Albany plan for the union of the colonies, Jefferson's purchase of Louisiana. The enthusiastic personal element that plays through these individual yet social projects lends an unusual strength to such topics. The man's life and energy are absorbed into and identified with the undertaking. He becomes a powerful and living exponent of a national or world idea. For instructional purposes such projects, thus reenforced by personal, objective demonstration, are of surprising value. We can afford to work out such projects descriptively and more or less exhaustively till we find a full background for the main idea, the completed purpose.

Fifthly : The masterpieces of literature are the outcome , of thought projects conceived and elaborated in the minds of authors, for example, Plato's Republic, St. Master- John's Gospel, De Foe's Robinson Crusoe, Shake- pieces in

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speare's Macbeth, Longfellow's Building of the considered Ship, Fiske's Critical Period of American History, ^^ pj^^jects Plutarch's Lives. A drama or novel or poem is the energy of the author's thought working itself out and projecting itself into a great thought-movement. It is active and stimulating, and yet is caught and held somehow in a permanent artistic form. A masterpiece is a tangible literary project, a rational undertaking looking toward a well-planned achievement. Literary products are the greatest projects of the human mind and a's such they are the best examples of great thought units, of knowledge rightly organized and artistically grouped. As perfected, energized thought-movements, complete units of effort, they demand thoughtful, elaborate, progressive study. The outcome of such study is a full appreciation of their constructive, dynamic quality and their final unity.

By a survey and comparison of these various interpretations of the term project as seen in the several studies, we may conclude that it is a practical, untechnical word with which to designate a variety of big, vital topics. It lays stress upon the actual and objective in present and past experiences. It deals with an energetic, growing idea, concretely embodied, that expands into a strong, even, national influence. \ Projects force attention upon the main objects of study, tlie chief enterprises that make up the warp and woof of real life in our times.

At the present moment we need to be jolted out of our conventional, formal school phrases and to find terms better . ^ ^ adaipted to the educational needs and forces of

A return to ^

life and the hour. The term project is a newcomer among educational phrases. It seems to suggest not the school but the shop, not the textbook but the busy mart, the industrial life, the unhallowed things of the schemer and the promoter. Perhaps this is its merit, that it forces attention upon things that have come to importance in life, things which need to break over the threshold into the

PROJECTS IN THE SCHOOL II

school. The project idea suits our present needs because it tosses aside our conventional abstractions and sets up a larger practical unit of knowledge as the basis of study. We have been dealing with things of nciinor import till we have lost sight of the centers of thought, the big object lessons. We have devoted ourselves to facts, mere facts, isolated facts, — yes, detached and meaningless facts. The children have been surfeited with facts. But it is time to stop making collections of blank cartridges and begin to gather only those things that have explosive material in them. Again, we have played with school phrases and generahties and summaries till they cease to express thought. It is time to cast out this mummery and to deal with Kve thoughts embodied in real projects.

The term project suggests a return to life, to business, to applied science, to daily duties and common human needs, to forces operative in the concrete world. The school is absorbing into itself as fast as it can the big things of life, the schemes that men and women are chiefly concerned about, and these are becoming our school topics. The project accentuates this demand for the practical and demonstrable. By a proper extension of the term it includes several groups of big, constructive units of study in history and geography and science, and culminates in the masterpieces of literature and works of art, as poems, buildings, sculptures, and paintings, because these at their best are great designs worked out by artists to express the mind's boldest flights into the world of experience, the supreme purposes and projects that men have conceived.

The project, as such, is an apt device for teaching, because it touches off any important enterprise at its most interesting crisis, namely, at that juncture where it is in the initial process of being brought into shape in the mind. Pedagogically, we might call this " the nick of time " r "e t ^^ thinking out any enterprise. At this point it a scheme in shows itself in its freshness and newness, its ext ema ng pgctation, its purpose. Its growth from this initial stage should be natural and progressive. Let the project develop in its own way, revealing its ugly form or its pleasant aspect as it will. The succession of problems will follow in due order. The important project is always a problem and a mother of problems. The demand of the hour is to have a chance to think, to knit the brow in thought problems, to struggle with a difficult and critical situation till a solution of the problem is discovered. Live projects, wisely selected, not only set up serious problems, but they draw in their wake the knowledge materials required for the understanding and solution of the problems involved. Big projects are deeply rooted in the strong knowledge elements of the important studies. A deeper and richer scholarship inevitably clusters and organizes itself around the main projects. This is so because our modern social and industrial problems have sprung directly out of a full field of scientific, historical, and economic knowledge. These deep, abundant sources of knowledge are our necessary tools in working out our projects. Extensive and up-to-date knowledge is requisite to work out and understand these practical projects. One proof of this need for depth and richness of knowledge in discussing these projects is the fact that even trained experts in the various special lines are required in all these big, practical enterprises.

We have been discussing the word project as denoting something objective and concrete. But back of this, its real meaning lies in an idea, in something thought out and

PROJECTS IN THE SCHOOL I3

clearly conceived, first as a mental product, later to be worked over and transformed into a concrete reality. The synonyms of the word project are scheme, plan, designXjxi this sense the project is first of all a clear, a mentar*^ ' clean-cut, intellectual grasp of a whole complex concept to

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situation. It corresponds to the well-worked-out design of the architect which expresses the plan of a great building. The project is a strongly, wisely organized body ' of thought focused upon an important center of practical knowledge with a definite purpose. It is the intellectual formulation and mastery of a problematic situation as a preparation for its practical execution. It leads on through a series of wisely controlled actions. In the idea of the project lies also the impulse to realize it, to carry out the^ purpose clearly conceived, for example, the sinking of a shaft for the purpose of exploiting a coal bed. This demand for clear thinking as a basis for later action, leading on naturally to a complete accompKshment, makes the project an ideal basis for teaching and for lesson planning. The project sets up something clear and complete in thought but lacking in fulfillment. It sets up the demand for full reaHzation, and this is a dynamic quality which energizes effort in the right direction.

Standing out prominently, almost objectively, as a clearly thought plan to be converted into reality, the project contains the most important elements of a standard ^, ^ ^

^ ... standard

unit of mental effort. First, it is an important elements in whole. Secondly, it is dynamic in its essential * ^^^^^^^ forward movement. Thirdly, it organizes and uses knowledge on the basis of a definite purpose. Fourthly, it sets up a series of problems requiring continuous, rational effort. Fifthly, it works out a practical result which is embodied in a concrete object or situation in real life. Sixthly, as an end result of the whole movement, from original conception to final objective realization, it leaves in the mind a knowledge product which serves to introduce and explain other kindred projects. It has a future as well as a past and connects up between the two. Thus it contributes to the continuous organization of knowledge.

Important projects, therefore, carefully selected in the various studies, are the practical units of thought, the organizing centers, where knowledge is collected and School proj- incorporated into those powerful agencies which

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press and carry on the world's business. Thinking out J2e^^" and understanding these projects puts the student into the stream of action, into the current of life. We demand that education be a preparation for life, but it can be this only by identifying itself with the main enterprises going on in life, that is, with enterprises which have developed under Hfe conditions. Many of these enterprises are now active agencies, organizing and directing the social and industrial forces of the world. Others have grown up in the past and have created institutions which are still powerful as Hfe centers. Still others are mainly historical, but carry important lessons to us from past experience. The building and equipment of a monastery in medieval times was in those days a vital, Kving project. Hannibal's march across the Alps to attack Rome was a well-matured project. Hercules' scheme for cleansing the Augean stables was a true project in the modern sense. Joseph's farsighted scheme for deaHng with the wheat crop of Egypt during the seven full years was a great project.

But it is the projects of modern Hfe and society that most concern us. In the short period of school life children should be led on till they gain insight, one after another, into the masterful projects that concern the progress and welfare of the people in their struggles to master the bountiful resources of nature. Such schemes concretelyworked out form naturally the big centers of study. They designate the main channels along which human life has organized its experiences and converted them into institutions through which men have been able to accomplish their purposes. These very projects, already organized by experience into complete schemes and processes for accomplishing the chief purposes of life, are the best units of study for the schools.

Nor are these projects new or foreign to our present school course. A keener and closer inspection of these project-topics will discover that they deal with the self-same concepts which are now treated in Projects are

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the textbooks. But only the more significant handling of subjects dealt with in the books are selected, and H^l^^^ by intensive treatment brought into marked prominence. They are given an emphasis and a fullness of descriptive exposition which are surprising. They are not new, and yet one thing in them is strangely new. They are dressed up in their proper clothing. We do not recognize them at first because we never before saw them in full equipment and with an adequate setting. For example, the increase of corn production in the United States, the project of developing San Francisco harbor, the building up and life history of Mount Shasta, the purpose of Ernest in the story of the Great Stone Face, how the blood circulates and performs its functions, the laying out of the school and home garden, a class at work dramatizing the story of William Tell, the designing and construction of a bird house.

These and many more like them are not new topics. They are simply familiar topics enlarged into proper units of purposeful effort. They are fully embodied and demonstrated life problems. They are suggested and put before children in this more complete form to stimulate thought, to put the minds of children into natural, spontaneous action toward worthy ends.

Conclusion

Projects reorganize the best knowledge materials of the elementary school around practical life centers. The smaller projects of children grow into the greater projects of the community and of society. These projects develop everywhere through series of problems undertaken with set purpose to realize important ends. The teaching possibilities that open up through the steady schoolroom pursuit of these developing projects are both interesting and remarkable.

A Forecast

If the project is once accepted as the true t3^e of knowledge organized for teaching uses, it sets up the large unit of study as a basis for selecting and treating school subjects.

The big unit of study is a superior substitute for the present somewhat miscellaneous collections. It^ is the clear demonstration of a reconstructive principle which is now at work rebuilding our courses of study and reorganizing our classroom^ instruction.

We have already gone to the limit of filling up our curriculum with all kinds of information and with many forms of activity. We have been so busy collecting these varied materials that we have not yet had time and strength to simplify and organize. The big, central unit of growing knowledge, the project, is the sure corrective to our present fragmentary accumulations of knowledge.

The adoption of such large standard units of organized knowledge points directly toward a simplified course of study and to a sound basis for lesson planning.

A second point of almost equal importance is the outstanding objective character of the project. It is never abstract and general. It is incurably objective. Teachers and textbooks drift almost invariably into abstract forms. But the acceptance of the project strikes the death blow at this prevailing tendency toward abstract method in teaching.

The following chapters will elaborate the above-mentioned points.

Chapter II Examples Of Complete Projects

A BETTER understanding of the meaning and scope of these school projects may be gained from complete illustrations. This chapter is given over to such illustrations. Several projects are here worked out tentatively as suitable for school use. In the later chapters other projects are introduced to illustrate special points and are developed on a still larger scale. Many other school projects have been more or less elaborately worked out as monographs and are published in pamphlet or book form. In the following chapters frequent use is made (by reference) of these attempts to put projects into the form of complete imits of study. The project type of organization, as exhibited in these illustrations, helps to clear up the principles of method as directly applied to subject matter in teaching.

Garden Projects

The planning of a school or home garden is a project which has come into vogue in many schools and in all parts of the country. The garden work, planned for a season, is not only a practical project, but it develops into a whole series of minor projects which spring out of individual or family needs. The following table of contents gives the series of topics treated in a pamphlet entitled "The School

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EXAMPLES OF COMPLETE PROJECTS I9

and Home Garden." ^ Without premeditated effort to emphasize the project idea, it evidently consists of a series of projects carried out in the natural order of development. The initial project, the measuring and staking out of the garden plot, is clearly shown by the chart on the following page. One of the minor projects is shown in the sketch of the hotbed.