Active learning practitioners perceive students less as knowledge consumers and more as knowledge producers who are active in their own learning process. While active learning is not an entirely new concept, it is gaining traction not least because the way learners interact with knowledge has already shifted rapidly in the last decades due to new technologies and the internet. Influenced by these changes, active learning in the 21st Century entails getting away from the textbook as an authoritative source of knowledge and instead asking the students to curate the sources from which they will extract the relevant information and synthesize into a new knowledge artifact. Since I teach in the humanities at the university level, I’m interested in how incorporating active learning concepts into my teaching can better prepare young adult students for the real world. In particular, I want them to not only get hired, but also be active citizens and community members who can critically engage with the world around them.

The active learning concept of project-based learning is a useful concept to help meet these learning goals. According to Stanford University’s Teaching Commons, Project-Based Learning (PBL) focuses on developing creative, realistic, and tangible solutions to a real problem through teamwork. In the humanistic disciplines, identifying a “real problem” entails developing an original research question with real-life implications and to make new connections between the sources of knowledge that the students curate. Students can then present their findings through publishing a website or a multimedia presentation saved in the cloud. This way the artifact they have produced exists in the real world for an audience, and not just on a paper exchanged between student and instructor. When smaller paper assessments are converted into a bigger multimedia project, students develop their problem-solving skills and the collaboration skills necessary to thrive in today’s workplace, as well as produce a knowledge artifact that can showcase their technological literacy and presentational skills.

It is believed that PBL advances critical thinking skills more effectively than traditional instruction. The teacher no longer holds all the content, but rather teaches students how to find content and how to look at it critically, both building confidence in the learner and making learning meaningful and authentic (Whitby). Through surveying college students, a 2017 action research investigation found that PBL improves critical thinking in college students through the following teaching applications: modeling critical thinking, practicing questioning techniques, engaging with relevant technology, and creating a relaxed classroom environment (Dimmitt). Relinquishing some control over the direction of the lesson in order to become expert facilitators of an environment where students share ideas with instructors and each other will help to cultivate responsible and active 21st century citizens and prepared job seekers.

Works Referenced:

Dimmit, Nicholas. “The Power of Project Based Learning: Experiential Education to Develop Critical Thinking Skills for University Students.” CBU International Conference on Innovations in Science and Education. Prague: 2017, pp 575-579.

“Project Based Learning.” Stanford Teaching Commons, Stanford University. https://teachingcommons.stanford.edu/resources/learning/learning-activities/project-based-learning

Whitby, Greg. “Developing Critical Thinking Using Project-Based Learning.” Teacher: Evidence, Insight, Action. https://www.teachermagazine.com.au/articles/developing-critical-thinking-using-project-based-learning