Foreign languages faculty

Renaissance of the Project Method in the 1960s
In contrast to its Eastern European neighbors and after the end of the Hitler dictatorship, Western Europe went through a phase of restoration. The ideas that had flourished during the period between the wars emerged once again. Progressive methods of teaching became viable options in discussions of school reform, on both historical and conceptual grounds. In the late 1960s, the situation once again changed radically. Students not only protested against imperialism, capitalism, and authoritarianism, but also rebelled against structures of repression and domination which were perceived to be at the heart of academic institutions (personified in college and university administrators). Projects emerged as an alternative to traditional lecture and seminar formats. They were viewed as a form of learning through inquiry and were promoted for their practical relevance, interdisciplinarity, and social bearing. The project idea spread quickly from the universities to the schools, and from Western Europe throughout the world; but the center and focus of this third great wave of project discussion was and remained in Germany.
The uniqueness of the German situation during the period between the wars was that her educational reformers were suspected of having paved the way for Fascism and National Socialism. Their proposals for educational innovations were largely rejected in the 1960s and 1970s in favor of American progressive education movement concepts. With Dewey and Kilpatrick's project method, many of the new reformers believed that they had found the mechanism for the democratic and libertarian transformation of school and society. However, their appropriation of American models was only fragmentary. From Dewey's formula of "education for democracy" and Kilpatrick's slogan of "hearty purposeful activity," they concluded that all actions could be classified as projects as long as they satisfied the criteria of self-determination and self-satisfying needs. When the realities associated with imparting systematic knowledge and skills through independent project work emerged, the new reformers developed a more differentiated approach. On typical, routine school days, a reduced form of project-oriented teaching was used; but on special occasions (e.g., before public holidays and vacations), an ideal form of project teaching was employed. Implementing this ideal form consisted of special project days and project weeks during which the normal curriculum and the teacher's "planning monopoly" were suspended. During project weeks, the process was sometimes so open that virtually anything the pupils fancied, from making cider to staging peace demonstrations, qualified as a project. This project euphoria soon evaporated. Since the 1980s, much of the sharp disparity between the standard course of instruction and the project method has been resolved. Currently, substantial effort is being directed toward harmonizing project work with more conventional methods of teaching.
The development of the term "project," within its broader conceptual and historical contexts, extends its customary interpretation. As a result, traditional historiography should be modified in the following three respects:

1. The "project" is a concept dating from the 17th and 18th centuries, belonging in the same category as the "experiment" of the natural scientist, the "case study" of the jurist, and the "sand-table exercise" of the staff officer. Like the experiment, the case study, and the sand-table exercise, the project method has its origin in the professionalization of an occupation. It was introduced in the curriculum so that students could learn at school to work independently and combine theory with practice. In contrast to experiment, case study, and sand-table exercises, the project method is not a matter of empirical, hermeneutical, or strategic studies, but of "construction" (i.e., designing a house, building a playground, or producing a machine).

2. The two basic models of the project method still used today were already developed in the 19th century. According to the older model (e.g., Woodward) students first learn, in a course of instruction, the skills and knowledge that they then apply independently and creatively in the practical project. According to the more recent model (e.g., Richards), the project is moved from the end of the unit to the center of teaching, in accordance with the fundamental idea of the new psychology that "natural wholes" must be the subject of learning if valuable interests and insights are to be developed. Here, the course of instruction does not precede the project, but is integrated into it.
3. At the beginning of the 20th century, a movement arose among American progressive educators (e.g., Kilpatrick) that attempted to replace (a) the traditional narrow definition of the project with a new, broad one, and (b) "constructive" activity with "purposeful" action as the crucial feature of the project method. This new definition was unable to gain ascendancy in the United States, but in other countries it was accepted as an innovation and a truly democratic achievement, with the paradoxical result that in Europe today the broad "American" concept predominates, while in America the narrow "European" approach plays the leading role.
The history of the project method makes it clear that the progressive education movement at the turn of the century represented only one, and not even the most important, international reform movement in modern times. Unlike Cremin (1961) and Röhrs (1977), for example, we cannot simply regard the 19th century as "prehistory" and the 20th century simply as "post history." We must, with Jurgen Oelkers (1996), see progressive education as part of a continuous, albeit differentiated, development springing from definite social and educational needs and reaching from the 17th century up to the present. Only from this broad perspective can industrial education-like professional and vocational education as a whole-be properly perceived as a fecund source of modern progressive educational practices. However, the history of the project method also illustrates how necessary it is to embed current thinking about educational reform within a historical context. Otherwise, as Cuban (1990) and Tyack and Cuban (1995) have correctly observed, reform moves from initiative to initiative without a clear understanding of why they dissipate and vanish. The results are frequently disappointing and meaningless. In the case of the project approach, a specific and indispensable method of teaching is turned by Kilpatrick and his followers into a general and blurred philosophy of education (Katz & Chard 1989).

2. 
   Types and principles of project method
   

The project method is a significant landmark in the history of the methodology of education. It is directly in line with the current progress and fits in very comfortably with the other developments. The method is not totally new. It owes its origin to the American philosophers belonging to the pragmatic school of philosophy. W. H. Kilpatrick was a chief proponent of this method. He was influenced by the John Dewey’s Pragmatism principle. He published a paper on ‘The Project Method’ in 1918. He mainly focuses on the purposeful activity and problem solving capacity of the students based on their needs, interest, attitudes and abilities.
The project method is the embodiment of a new way of looking at the pupil and a new way of teaching him to live. It aims at bringing out what is in the child and at allowing him to develop himself. It gives an opportunity for self-expression, and for relating the self to the community. The idea underlying the method is that the children should develop their knowledge through trying out theories in the practical solution of problems in the course of which they would come to appreciate the principle involved. For this purpose, a project will be purposeful act to achieve the desired objectives.
The term project is no longer reserved for the planned undertaking calling for the constructive thought and action. Project means almost any undertaking. It is activity oriented but it is more than the simple activity. It advocates that the education should be related to the life situation. The main focus of this strategy is socializing the child and developing the problem solving ability.