PhD defence by Kasper Anthon Sørensen

Assessment committee:
Professor Gert Biesta, University of Edinburgh 
Associate professor Gerd Christensen, University of Copenhagen 
Associate professor Laura Louise Sarauw, Roskilde University 
 

Abstract:
Working from the assumption that education always involves normative matters of val-ues and direction, this thesis is motivated by the question: What is the educational pur-pose of problem-oriented project-based learning? Lately, the answer to this question has either pointed self-evidently to ‘learning’, ‘qualification’ and ‘solving problems in the real world’, or it has been articulated through a marketised lingo that promises any outcome imagined to be wanted by students or policy-makers. This situation can be seen as part of the so-called knowledge (and learning) economy which dominates the global landscape of higher education and sees educational value mainly in terms of economic growth. Combined with a dominant logic of utility, it has become difficult to think of university education as (also) an end in itself. In this context, the thesis critically investigates how educational aims and purpose of problem-oriented project-based learning are formulated over time (in a Danish context). Such a study can illuminate the emergence of the current discourses and open up the stagnant discussion of the purposes of higher education.

In contemporary literature, ‘Problem-oriented project-based learning’, or ‘PPL’ as it called, is presented as a cutting-edge pedagogical concept that through principles such as problem-orientation, project work, participant-directed learning and interdisciplinarity provides students with the 21st century skills needed to succeed in life and work. ‘PPL’ is presented as a ‘reform pedagogy’ that arose after the student-rebellion of 1968 at the Danish reform universities in Roskilde and Aalborg in the early 1970s. There are few comprehensive research studies of ‘PPL’ and a particular lack of theoretically and empir-ically based studies that inquire critically into the emergence and pedagogical-theoretical inheritances of PPL. Answering such a call, this study sets out to challenge the dominant and take-for-granted truths of PPL as they are produced in, and by, significant texts. The investigation traces the emergence and change of the educational purposes of PPL over time from the 1970s until today to learn whether it is possible to think differently of what PPL is for as a form of education. Working from a poststructuralist discourse theory (Maclure 2003) and a genealogical perspective of history (Foucault 1977), ‘problem-ori-ented project-based learning’ (PPL) is conceptualised as a historicised construct, which is constantly stabilised contingent on time, space and perspective (as e.g. ‘project work’ or ‘project pedagogy’). As such, the truths told of PPL, and what this approach to edu-cation is for, are constructed in certain ways as temporary effects of discursive struggles for dominance. The task here is to show these contingent struggles. Prompted by the contingency of ‘PPL’ and an interest in central truth-producing textual introductions to this approach, the primary research question is: what are the continuities and discontinuities of the educational aims and purposes of PPL as seen in textual introductions from 1974-2018? Secondly, the study asks how the aims and purposes are constructed in the truth-producing work of the texts. A third research interest is to inquire into the ways in which PPL has been constructed as a ‘university pedagogy’.

To address these research questions, the investigation employs a detailed discourse-ori-ented reading of ten textual introductions that have been ‘used’ to teach and argue for PPL from the 1974 until 2018. The assemblage of texts include PPL-introductions from the centralised figure, Danish educator Knud Illeris. The sustained and detailed exami-nation of how these significant texts discursively construct PPL is a major contribution to the field of PPL-studies. Through analytical strategies inspired by Clare Hemmings (2011) and Maggie Maclure (2003), the texts are read in detail for their intelligibility, cita-tion practices, temporal constructions and affective positionings of first and other. The analysis is divided into individual readings of each texts allowing for detail, nuances and complexity, which is followed by a cross-reading that lays out how discourses have con-stituted the educational aims and purposes over time.

The cross-reading identifies five intertwined responses, or justifications, to the question of what PPL education aims at: qualification, the development of competencies, learning, academic knowledge acquisition (‘erkendelse’) and social critique. As a dominant and continuous purpose of PPL, qualification figures as an inherent purpose to PPL which is legitimised through its development of useable skills for the labour market. The formulations of ‘qualifica-tion’ changed and intensified from the 1990s and onwards with an emerging competency discourse that constructs PPL almost exclusively in terms of commodified personal, social and academic outcomes for not just the labour market, but for all parts of life. Intertwined with ‘qualification’ is the justification that PPL is a progressive form of learning. This was central to the early formulations in the 1970s emphasising PPL as excellent for ‘motiva-tion’ and ‘accommodative learning’ drawing on cognitive psychology, notably the psy-chologist J. Piaget. ‘Learning’ later proliferated as the natural language of PPL and made it into the name ‘PPL’ in 2015 as ‘problem-oriented project learning’. At the same time, ‘learning’ became an increasingly un-theorised and self-evident aim of PPL that after the 1980s went from being a means for societal emancipation, to acting as an end in itself. As PPL became part of the learnification of education in the 1990s, the individual student was put at the centre of PPL. Combined with the university imperative ‘responsibility for one’s own learning’, the student became responsible for its own success and failure, while the role of the teacher was toned down. In somewhat opposition to ‘learning’, and in some instances also ‘qualification’, the analysis identifies the formulation of PPL as an scientific research method for pursuing knowledge. Posed through the aim of ‘knowledge ac-quisition’ (‘erkendelse’), this aim is marginalised and underdeveloped in the dominant constructions of PPL. This reads as an effect of the inheritance as a progressive form of education sceptical of matters associated with ‘the traditional’ university which is cast as insular, bourgeois and outdated. The principles of ‘problem-orientation’ and ‘interdisci-plinarity’ arose as responses to ‘the university’, but were not developed much theoretically due to certain anti-university, and anti-Bildung, discourses. The final justification for PPL, ‘social critique’, is entangled with the other responses in complex and situated ways. Social critique in the form of ‘Fagkritik’ (disciplinary critique) directs itself both towards bourgeois Wissenschaft as well as towards society with action-oriented ‘research for the (oppressed) people’. Social critique emerged into the construction of PPL through vari-ous Marxist articulations in the 1970s and 1980s, simultaneously critiquing and adhering to ‘qualification’, but (especially in its more radical forms) being a counter-discourse to ‘learning’ and ‘personal development’ as ends of education. The Marxist focus on ‘the social’ continued as a central virtue in dominant truth-telling of PPL, but after the 1980s this was no longer articulated from a Marxist perspective. ‘Marx’ was erased in the later formulations of PPL, both as a present and historical influence. This lead to narratives of loss in some texts that had increasing difficulties of orientation for the otherwise cen-tralised concepts in PPL of ‘social relevance’ and ‘critique’. After the demise of university Marxism, the direction of PPL has predominantly been dictated by knowledge economy and competency discourses.

The final chapter of the thesis discusses the insights from the discourse analysis of PPL in relation to the current deadlock situation for openly debating the multiple purposes of higher education as more than qualification for the knowledge economy. It asks how PPL is a university pedagogy. The discussion, drawing in philosophical studies on the univer-sity and its pedagogy, points to re-introducing and substantiating the position of ‘the teacher-scholar’ as part of deliberating on relational pedagogical matters (ends, means, subjects, content), and to engage seriously with the idea of ‘the university’ beyond dichot-omies of ‘new’ and ‘traditional’. One fruitful perspective to (re)introduce for PPL is the neo-Humboldtian view of the university as an academic community and ecology of study. Finally, the study of PPL shows a need for including substantive pedagogical and philo-sophical perspectives in future reformulations of PPL including a language for education as valuable in itself. Such attentions are paramount in present and future reconstructions of PPL as a university pedagogy worthy of its name.

Find the thesis here.