Project-Based Learning (PBL) can be a liberatory pedagogy tied directly to dismantling racism. Black and brown students are often walking into schools where their stories have already been written for them. We have to change this by giving students authorship in sharing and telling their own stories. Success for all students—particularly those furthest from opportunity—means putting more intentionality around our practices. A high-quality project allows just this. This is a call to action to be intentional in the ways we disrupt education inequities by using High Quality PBL (HQPBL) practices.

Last year, along with 104 other organizations, PBLWorks signed on to promote and support the HQPBL framework. Since this model doesn’t explicitly address the ways HQPBL can advance racial equity, I’d like to offer an overlay to help educators more concretely see the connection between the two.

Intellectual Challenge and Accomplishment
Intellectual challenge and accomplishment means deeply believing in your core that ALL students can learn. With this, comes building a culture of excellence in your classroom. It means keeping to the highest possible standards and building students up to meet them. Believing in excellence, as demonstrated by setting high expectations, is the fuel that runs a successful PBL culture. Ron Berger writes about the importance of excellence eloquently in his book An Ethic of Excellence: “I believe that work of excellence is transformational. Once a student sees that he or she is capable of excellence, that student is never quite the same.” The challenge lives in teachers ensuring the proper scaffolding, knowing the current reality of their students, and in deeply believing that students can achieve excellence without a lowering of expectations.

Authenticity
Students are our greatest strength in the fight for educational justice. How are we allowing their leadership to show up in classrooms? Let’s embrace that powerful role and go beyond simply teaching the standards by providing our students with opportunities to become better people and act as change agents to make the world a better place.

What does it mean to build an authentic culture in a classroom? It means deeply understanding how social-emotional learning intersects with academic challenges. It means building trusting relationships together. It means allowing students to bring their whole selves to the classroom. This means honoring the intersectionalities of identity: race, class, gender and sexuality. We must allow students to solve complex problems that are global and locally grounded. This will add what Priya Parker calls “heat-burning relevance” and it makes connections beyond the classroom.

Authentic projects change the educational game for students. Too often, I hear stories about students who are pushed out of school citing that their education held no meaning to their lives. If done well, PBL is work that matters, and student engagement levels skyrocket because they are becoming active change agents to their communities and our planet.

Read the full article about Project-based Learning and equity by Dinah Becton-Consuegra at Getting Smart.