Pro and Cons of Project Based Learning – Brenau Presentation

Bent Sørensen & Camelia Elias

History and Early Practice: Bent Sørensen

1. General introduction to the Aalborg model

2. A brief history, with examples from the 70s, 80s and 90s, plus present day practice

------

1.

Aalborg University is a recent institution, founded in 1974, and born from an alliance of disparate forces. The left-wing government at the time wished for a decentralization of and democratization of access to higher education and created 3 new, provincial universities during a six year period from 1968 to 74, bringing the total of state universities in Denmark to 5 (at that time there were no private or independent universities at all). The two older universities in Copenhagen and Aarhus both have histories dating back to medieval times, but the two most recent additions in Roskilde and Aalborg are very different from those venerable institutions. Among the most significant innovations was the introduction of a new pedagogical model: project based learning.

In 1974 both left wing forces (the moderate social-democrats with a long tradition for being in government, as well as more radical Marxist intellectuals) found a common ground with business interests in promoting project based teaching and learning as a tool for modernizing university programs and giving university graduates more flexible skills. The left-wingers were keen to democratize education and demolish the existing hierarchies of professorial control over university programs. Marxists especially wanted new types of curricula with much more attention to ideology and critiques of power structures. On the other side of the spectrum business interests were beginning to realize that flexibility and the skills of being able to rapidly assimilate to new environments and fields were premium skills, and that they were ill served by graduates who had not learned to work well together with others and had not mastered the art of rapid, independent and critical evaluation of mounds of information. Project based learning seemed to offer the perfect solution for both sides of the spectrum: Interdisciplinarity and problem-focused learning appealed to left-wingers who saw the potential for social change coming from candidates thinking in complex and holistic terms; group-organized work and self-determined work areas (under strict supervision, of course) as customary in project groups appealed to businesses who saw that such learning would be more efficient and very similar to the work structures found in organizations and corporations.

The original idea with Aalborg University was to create a so-called ‘university center’ and unify traditional university subjects (chiefly engineering, natural sciences, social sciences and languages) with programs from vocational degree granting institutions, such as teacher training colleges, nursing schools and library schools (all of which already existed in Aalborg, a fairly large industrial town then in the throes of coping with industry redundancies and change towards a service oriented economy instead of a production oriented one). Ultimately only the library school was (partially) integrated into the new university, whereas the other institutions have remained separate and only recently become bachelor degree granting institutions. Those vocational degrees are all 4-year programs in Denmark, whereas university degrees in the humanities, sciences and social sciences are 5-year programs, at least if you want a Masters level degree – and nobody wants to leave with just a Bachelor, because nobody will hire a candidate with ’just’ that.

The ideological foundation of Aalborg University (Center) was and is then: Teaching is interdisciplinary and problem-oriented; learning is project-organized, group work-based, self-formulated, and problem-oriented.

Teaching: very little lecturing goes on, very few survey courses are offered. Courses are of short duration, usually amounting to half a semester’s length, leaving the other half for writing papers and projects and for exams. There is little correlation between topics taught in lectures and seminars and the actual exams – unless the students want there to be. Roughly speaking, we expect the students to meet the requirements and to be able to pass the exams. How they achieve that is largely up to them. If they elect not to take any courses, but still can pass the exam that is fine with us. This sounds callous, I know, and of course we advise students to follow the course offerings. However the fact that course attendance is not a requirement, makes it easier for students to plan their working day around outside activities related to jobs and families, if they have such special needs. It is also an advantage in administration, since we do not have to bother with attendance records, registrations for courses etc., only with registration for exams. The other half of the reason for why we can allow ourselves to disregard attendance as a parameter has to do exactly with the project-organized learning process.

Learning: As a default you write one project pr. semester. Each semester has a defined, but broad theme. In the English program the freshman and sophomore years have fixed themes, known as ‘dimensions’:

  1. European Cultural Studies (together with other language program students)
  2. Social History, politics, civics
  3. Language studies
  4. Literary studies & Cultural studies

The rest of the BA (i.e. 5th and 6th semesters) you choose freely among the dimensions, as indeed you do if you go on to the MA level – which minimally consists of one more semester in which you write your MA thesis, but which can consist of as many as four more semesters if you elect to do an MA honors program exclusively in English. Most students do a total of 7 or 8 semesters of English and 2 to 3 semesters of a minor, freely chosen among our offerings across the faculties, which makes them MAs in English and math, German, psychology, history, music etc.

The projects as such are relatively long research papers, dealing with a complex of issues – what we call a ‘problem’. This problem is self-formulated by the project groups’ members (usually 2-6 students who have chosen to work together, most on the lower semesters, fewest on the advanced levels. The MA thesis is usually an individual piece of work, but we allow groups of 2 and 3 even on that highest level). The students are expected to spend a good deal of time selecting the topic, identifying the issues/problems, developing a set of approaches (interdisciplinarity) that might throw light on the problem. The phase of problem formulation or generation of research questions can take weeks or even 2-3 months to complete (and even then it remains a dynamic process that evolves as you learn more and more).

Teaching and learning: The group may of course have chosen a topic that has been dealt with during the teaching half of the semester. Thus they will have done some of the necessary background work in relation to lectures and seminars they have participated in or attended. When they form as a group and declare their subject in the form of a working title, they are assigned a project supervisor, i.e. a professor or teaching assistant who will help them find literature, think about approaches, write down draft formulations of the problems and research questions, and who will eventually give feedback on drafts of chapters for the project and the final handed-in version of the work.

Evaluation: At the end of that process there is almost always an oral exam in the form of a group presentation and discussion of the findings of the project. The supervisor here changes roles and becomes the examiner. A second professor audits and/or takes part in the exam and sets the grade in collaboration with the supervisor. The grade is 50 % based on the written project and the other half marks the quality of the oral presentation. Often the second professor is an external, state-appointed examiner from another institution, which guarantees uniformity of level of grading and impartiality and observation of the rules and codes of ethics through the process. All MA theses are read and graded by external examiners. A good exam is one where the students demonstrate detailed, in-depth knowledge of their chosen problem area, and simultaneously are able to situate this concrete knowledge in a larger, scientific context, determined by the particular semester’s overall ‘dimension’.

2.

I was myself a student at Aalborg University from 1977 to 1984. In those days projects and the project ideology was taken extremely seriously, both by professors and – particularly – by students, many of whom had chosen AAU because it offered the project-based model of learning. A professor was only assigned one or two groups to supervise pr. semester, which meant that there was more than enough time for in-depth discussions and correction of multiple drafts for each chapter. Projects tended to be very broad because they contained social theory as their foundation almost as a default, even when the object of analysis was a fictional text or another aesthetic product. Students would often decide to spend two semesters or more on the really important projects, usually the ones with external examiners. The course offerings in those years were extremely sparse, partly because the student population was very low, partly because the academic staff was just being established, and partly because students usually disregarded most of the courses offered unless they provided a solid element of Marxist theory.

In the 80s courses picked up in quality and quantity. We were using the Norton anthologies of English and American literature, and were given some sort of overview of genres and periods. It was still rather haphazard what we chose as project topics. I for instance wrote on the IWW and their manifestoes for my literary project on the 4th semester and on contemporary British group theatre for my BA-project, while my MA-thesis was conceived as an analysis of feminist utopian and dystopian science fiction. All worthwhile projects, but rather unrelated through method, period, genre – what have you…

As the 90s rolled along I returned to Aalborg as a teaching assistant and started teaching courses myself. During that time Camelia came to Aalborg as a student, and she will talk about the experiences of being a student at Aalborg during the early 90s, and her current experiences as a lecturer at AAU.

Project work 1993-1998 – Camelia Elias

Pros

Freedom to choose the subject independent of the courses taken during the semester.

  • Courses offered at the time dealt with thematic approaches, close reading of literary texts. We had courses on the gothic novel, horror, love stories (4th semester); culture through psychoanalysis, storied bodies, socio-linguistics, Irish studies

Freedom to write about a literary text using a theoretical approach as the main anchor.

  • EX. while deconstruction was mentioned nowhere in any of the courses we took that semester – there were simply no courses in literary history or theory, deconstruction was accepted as a reading strategy and a tool we could employ in our project.

Cons

  • The downside of working with a project which relies heavily on theory, when theory is not part of the teaching, is that one still had to comply with the requirement of writing about a literary text, meaning close reading, attention to narrative strategies such as plot, character development, setting, stylistics, and so on.
  • So it was difficult to find somebody who would feel confident enough about approaching a theoretical subject without proper introduction.
  • EX: I did my 4th semester project with a colleague of mine who was interested in Virginia Woolf. Now, I had to convince her that employing deconstruction was a good idea. Although she agreed, I could see that she didn’t have either the inclination, or the desire to let herself be immersed into a lot of Derrida, so the project ended up being too polarized and divided markedly between theory and close reading à la the new critics.
  • The fact that we worked so individually also reflected in the way we actually ended up presenting the project. We defended the project separately and on two occasions, as my colleague had gotten sick on the day of the exam, and we argued that anyway we had very different things to say about A Room of One’s Own.

Pros

Now, the oral defence in general is an integral part of the project.

  • All students enjoy defending their project as a group.
  • If you are nervous about the exam or run out of ideas, the others in the group who know you and know what you want to say and why, usually come to your rescue.
  • The students often also find that they learn more at the defence especially when some of the questions posed open up to interesting perspectives. Everybody gets animated and wants to contribute.

My own teaching philosophy

While the need for theory has been addressed now for some time, and we offer wonderful classes that combine theory with literature, I myself like to offer a comparative component to that.

In line with the interdisciplinary aim at Aalborg, I like to bring in other disciplines in my teaching.

Whether I teach abstract concepts, periods or literary genres, I like to begin with a survey and make references to other national literatures, especially if I can establish affinities with literary texts other than the English or American, their influence on English texts, or their impact, if there is any.

-Interdisciplinary and comparative approaches are actually very well suited for project based work.

-When students work in groups and have to write research projects, they often go in different directions, but ultimately contribute their finding to the creation of a synthesis of a sum total that is relevant for literary studies.

1