Abstract
In an effort to boost engagement while also nurturing 21st century skills such as collaboration and critical thinking, a growing number of U.S. public schools have expanded opportunities for students to engage in applied learning experiences via projects. This conceptual article explores the under-examined relationship between such experiences and the logic of neoliberal capitalism. The author explores how project-based learning, despite its potential as a lever for equity, sometimes takes up neoliberal capitalist tropes such as individualism, competition, profit maximization, the commodification of learner-made artifacts, and market-based solutions to social problems. The article suggests that until the field embraces approaches to project-based learning which include a Freirian emphasis on criticality and praxis, capitalist logic will persist as a mechanism by which “real world” learning can perpetuate all-too-real systems of oppression.
Keywords
On a foggy November morning, 60 sixth-grade students arrive early to the campus of their urban public school. The kids are dressed to impress and buzzing with excitement. Today is their field trip to their local Junior Achievement BizTown site, 1 and they have been looking forward to it for months. As the teachers check permission slips and organize the carpool groups, the kids chatter to each other about the day to come. “I’m gonna use my whole paycheck to buy candy,” one kid announces to his friends. “There better be candy.”
The visit—a full-day simulation experience in which students work, shop, and vote as if they are adults—is the culmination of a project-based curriculum unit whose stated goals involve career exploration, entrepreneurial thinking, and financial literacy. Each week for twelve weeks, drawing on BizTown’s proprietary curriculum resources, the school’s sixth-grade teachers teach lessons on topics such as the virtues of free enterprise, how banks make loans, and how to keep track of money earned versus money spent. Later, the students conduct research into the training requirements and salaries associated with their dream careers. Finally, they write applications for the job that they wanted during their BizTown visit. Some will be bankers; some will work for the local utility company; some will work in healthcare; some will work as managers in fast-food joints. One of them will be the CEO. Another will be the Mayor. In return for executing their jobs well, all students will earn Monopoly-style “BizTown” dollars, to be used to cover their own business’s overhead as well as to buy goods and services at the other businesses in the building.
BizTown itself has a mall-like layout. Arranged around an indoor courtyard are realistic storefronts that advertise the names of the businesses and organizations that anchor the simulation, many of which double as the program’s financial sponsors. Once the carloads of kids have arrived, the students and parent volunteers gather for an orientation. A facilitator shares the rules, including an important “no running” rule; any student caught running will have to pay a fine and be lectured by the Mayor. At the end of the orientation, a student participant who has been assigned to the role of environmental specialist stands up and reads off a script. “We will be having a contest to see which group can recycle most,” he says. “May the best group win!” With that, the kids hustle (without running!) to their posts, and the simulation begins.
Purpose: Problematizing Capitalist Logic in Project-Based Learning
BizTown USA, first launched in 2001 as part of Junior Achievement’s efforts to create “a more equitable and just tomorrow,” was a harbinger of the enthusiasm for applied learning that has gained ground in recent years (www.jausa.ja.org; Ventura, 2024). To this end, in response to low student engagement (Geraci et al., 2017) and calls for schools to equip students with “21st century skills” such as collaboration, communication, and creativity (Trilling & Fadel, 2012), a growing number of U.S. schools have sought to expand opportunities for students to engage in projects which connect academic learning to the world beyond school. Although the extent of such efforts is difficult to quantify, their prevalence is evidenced by a proliferation of reports featuring school districts working to develop programs and pedagogies which center authentic purposes and audiences (for examples see Fullan & Quinn, 2015; Hernandez et al., 2019, and S. M. Fine & Mehta, 2024.). In a recent RAND study of school district leaders, almost 40% of respondents (62/157) provided examples of “real-world, applied, authentic, or hands-on learning” when asked how their districts were encouraging deeper learning (Schwartz & Diliberti, 2024, p. 3). The field’s enthusiasm for applied learning is also evidenced by the spread of “linked learning” approaches which connect academic courses with career and technical education (Linked Learning Alliance, n.d.) and by the rapid growth of organizations such as Real World Learning, which supports districts in developing “immersive experiences” such as client-connected projects (Real World Learning, n.d.). Most recently, President-elect Trump’s education agenda emphasizes the importance of “hands-on projects that aim to approximate what real-world work situations will demand of them” (DonaldJTrump.com, n.d.).
School-based efforts to create opportunities for applied learning vary widely in terms of their structure, duration, focus areas, and reliance on external organizations (Schwartz & Diliberti, 2024). Nevertheless, these efforts are connected by the foundational orientation of project-based learning (PBL). Grounded in the work of John Dewey and in the theories of situated learning and constructivism, PBL emphasizes learning by doing and offers educators a way to create open-ended, learner-centered, high-engagement experiences which connect academic content to authentic purposes and audiences (Turk & Berman, 2018). Although PBL historically was mainly the province of progressive schools serving elite students (Semel & Sadovnik, 2005), a growing number of equity-minded educators and system leaders have identified that PBL—along with PBL-adjacent approaches such as simulations, experiential learning, and hands-on learning 2 —offers a way to engage learners from all backgrounds in relevant and rigorous work as well as to disrupt long-standing patterns by which learners furthest from opportunity are disproportionately subjected to drill-and-kill instruction (Anyon, 1981; Grossman et al., 2021; Ladson-Billings & Ladson-Billings, 2006). Buttressing this belief is an evidence-base that PBL has positive impacts on student achievement, including but not limited to those from marginalized backgrounds (Chen & Yang, 2019; Condliffe, 2017; Saavedra et al., 2022).
This article takes as a foundational assumption that PBL and PBL-adjacent approaches offer a promising way to pursue educational equity via transforming learners’ relationships with school. In an effort to deepen conversations which offer up PBL as the latest “fix” for educational inequity, however, this article seeks to demonstrate the ways in which PBL can, when enacted uncritically, result in the reproduction of oppressive belief systems (S. M. Fine, 2016). To this end, the article sheds light on the underexamined relationship between PBL and free market capitalism, e.g., the system of profit-driven enterprise which organizes the U.S. economy and which is inextricably entwined with the legacy of chattel slavery (Bhattacharyya, 2018; Kendi, 2017) as well as rising income inequality and the worsening climate crisis (Biewan & McGirt, 2024). Capitalist logic, on full display in the BizTown vignette above, centers the importance of competition, individualism, profit maximization, the commodification of human labor, and exploitation of the natural world (Heilbroner, 1985)—qualities which critical scholars, including this author, view as being linked to an oppressive status quo rather than to a vision of collective liberation and environmental sustainability (Biewan & McGirt, 2024; Freire & Ramos, 1970; hooks, 1994; Love, 2019).
Although scholars have explored the ways in which macro-level school reforms often serve the interests of neoliberal capitalism and the racialized inequities inscribed within it (Love, 2023; Morales-Doyle & Gutstein, 2019), little previous work has attended to the micro-level ways in which capitalist logic shows up within curriculum and instruction. Seeking to address this gap, this article uses conceptual discussion along with empirical cases to explore and problematize the role of capitalist logic within PBL. The article asks: Why and in what range of ways does capitalist logic show up in some PBL experiences? What can the tradition of critical pedagogy offer to PBL in relation to disrupting capitalist logic? These questions are not mainly empirical ones, and, as such, this is less an empirical than a conceptual paper. The four empirical cases that sit at the heart of the paper are nevertheless central to its argument, adding texture, illustrative clarity, and an opportunity for generative discussions by those in the field (Levinson & Fay, 2016).
The article’s central argument is that the current theory and practice of PBL are insufficient with respect to disrupting capitalist logic, and that Freirian critical pedagogy offers to fill in what is missing. To build this case, I begin by exploring the foundations of both PBL and critical pedagogy, positioning each in relation to the logic of capitalism and exploring how and why current conceptualizations of PBL fail to insulate themselves from capitalist tropes. In order to develop this argument, I then use the four empirical examples to trace a continuum of ways in which PBL might engage with capitalist logic, ranging from endorsement to critique. Finally, drawing on these examples, I advocate for a new approach—an approach that I call critical project-based learning—which marries PBL’s focus on authentic work with a Freirian emphasis on criticality and praxis. Until the field embraces such an approach, I argue, capitalist logic will persist as a default mechanism by which “real world” learning can perpetuate all-too-real systems of oppression which serve to maintain the status quo in and beyond schools.
Conceptual Analysis: Capitalist Logic, Project-Based Learning, and Critical Pedagogy
In the pages that follow, I first outline the logic of American capitalism and then use it as a lens through which to analyze the history, theory, and practices of PBL and critical pedagogy, respectively. Admittedly, these two pedagogical frameworks do not make for an apples-to-apples comparison. PBL is an approach to teaching and learning which draws on several interconnected theories within the learning sciences; it has a well-specified set of parameters and practices, but it is not always ideologically clear or theoretically unitary (Krajcik & Shin, 2014). By contrast, critical pedagogy has direct ties to the philosophy of Paulo Freire, who in turn drew from traditions of critical theory and its associated sub-theories, in particular Marxism. Critical pedagogy faces an inverse challenge to that of PBL: its ideological stances and theoretical grounding are clear by comparison to its core practices (Duncan-Andrade & Morrell, 2008; McLaren & Kincheloe, 2007; Pittard, 2015). Bringing the ideological clarity of critical pedagogy to bear on the procedural clarity of PBL, I argue, reveals the contours of the approach named above: critical project-based learning, which draws together the imperative to reorganize instruction around real-world problems with the imperative to support students in critiquing and working to transform oppressive systems.
Capitalist Logic
American politicians know all too well that to critique free market capitalism’s role as the organizing principle of the U.S. economy is to be dismissed by many as a dangerous radical. At the same time, however, critical scholars from around the globe have long critiqued capitalism for what they see as being a flawed set of assumptions: the commodification of human endeavors, the myopic focus on profits, the assumption of a fair playing field, the promotion of individualism over collectivism, the reliance on competition, the normalization of winners-take-all practices, the reification of the myth of meritocracy, the creation of a false equivalency between economic productivity and human worth, and a view of the natural world as a “resource” to be transformed into economic growth (Biewan & McGirt, 2024; Hersey, 2022; Magill & Rodriguez, 2017). In societies which commodify and exploit the labor of the many in order to concentrate profit in the hands of the few, anticapitalist theorists argue, people can never be truly free (Freire & Ramos, 1970; hooks, 1994). Liberation thus will require nothing short of a revolutionary shift in political, economic, and social order—a shift which must be grounded in the belief in the inherent value of all people (Horton & Freire, 1990), as well as a new (or a return to a very old) relationship with the land (Issar, 2021; Kimmerer, 2015).
The particular form of capitalism that characterizes the United States—known to many as liberal or neoliberal capitalism and standing in contrast to the social democratic capitalist systems which characterize many European nations (Esping-Andersen, 1990)—has a deeply problematic history. In recent years, critical scholars have focused specifically on how the U.S.’s interlocking systems of racialized labor exploitation and profit-driven free enterprise—shorthanded by some as racial capitalism—are responsible for its enduring legacy of institutional racism and white supremacy (Love, 2023; Morales-Doyle & Gutstein, 2019; Robinson, 2019). Racial capitalism is premised on a recognition that “slavery and capitalism are not independent or hierarchical to each other but rather co-articulating systems of power integral to the economic and political development of the United States” (Pierce, 2017, p. 27S). In this view, the logic of capitalism is inevitably racialized, preserving the racial caste system that forms the DNA of American society (Bhattacharyya, 2018; Issar, 2021; Wilkerson, 2020). American capitalism is thus implicated when it comes to contemporary issues such as income inequality, police brutality, and the climate crisis. Those who write about the ills of American capitalism often also extend their critiques to neoliberalism, an ideology which takes a race-blind view of society and embraces deregulation and market-based-solutions to social issues, including issues related to schooling (Harvey, 2007; Issar, 2021; Magill & Rodriguez, 2017). Over the past forty years, in particular, neoliberal approaches to school reform have been employed as a strategy to resist desegregation pressures and, more generally, to maintain longstanding patterns of White opportunity hoarding and anti-Blackness in education (Love, 2023).
Theory and Theory-Gaps in PBL
The roots of PBL can be traced to American philosopher John Dewey, who, as it happened, developed an anticapitalist stance in response to the second industrial revolution (Aoki, 2005; Cohen, 1998; Livingston & Quish, 2018). In his seminal book of essays, School and Society, Dewey (1915) explored one of the questions that preoccupied him throughout his career: how, in the context of a society that was increasingly organized around dehumanizing factory work, could the U.S. create a cooperative and empowered populace? The answer, Dewey famously offered, involved transforming the nation’s schools. As the country’s one common social institution, schools could serve to revitalize American culture (Cohen, 1988). To do so, schools should adopt a hands-on, inquiry-driven, interdisciplinary curriculum that would engage students in recreating the history of human society. By engaging in inquiry related to activities such as cooking or weaving, for example, children could explore historical, cultural, and scientific phenomena in a way that would be “more vital, more prolonged, and more containing of culture” than the experience of memorizing fragmented facts (Dewey, 1915, p. 33). In turn, this would position schools as a bulwark against the dangers of industrial capitalism, which Dewey saw an existential threat to American democracy (Cohen, 1998). Thus, although Dewey was ultimately known as a pragmatist, his vision of schooling nevertheless put him “on a collision course” with American capitalism (Livingston & Quish, 2018).
Dewey’s writings laid the foundation for what has come to be known as situated learning theory, which posits that knowing and doing cannot be disentangled (Altalib, 2002; Brown et al., 1989). Situated learning theory argues that to teach in rote and decontextualized ways is counterproductive to the goal of understanding. Instead, learning experiences should be designed around complex and authentic problems, with teachers taking on the role of guide and learners positioned as apprentices who gain competence through the application of knowledge and the acquisition of transferable skills (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Newmann, 1996; Winn, 1993). Situated learning theory draws also on constructivist theory, which describes learning as a process of active sensemaking in which learners are continually reconciling their prior beliefs and knowledge with new experiences (Piaget, 1952), and which suggests that teachers should thus function as facilitators rather than profess-ers of inert knowledge (Gordon, 2009; Windschitl, 1999).
The teaching and learning arrangements implied by situated learning theory and constructivism do, in many ways, offer a significant positive departure from the pedagogical status quo. For example, treating students as active sensemakers who are capable of inquiring into complex questions is a profoundly humanizing proposition (S. M. Fine, 2014), and the imperative to view real-world activities as “educative experiences” (Dewey, 1937/1997) opens the door for valuing communities and not just teachers or textbooks as sources of knowledge. Nevertheless, it is important to notice that situated learning theory and constructivism locate their values in the design rather than the content of learning experiences. Said differently, these theories are agnostic with respect to questions of power, politics, and structural oppression—or, perhaps more aptly, they assume that transforming the “how” of instruction will be sufficient to produce educational equity. Few traces of Dewey’s anticapitalism remain.
While most who write about PBL agree on its roots in Deweyan philosophy and its grounding in situated learning theory and constructivism (Krajcik & Shin, 2014), there is no single moment that defines its origins as an instructional approach. Some look to Dewey’s contemporary William Kilpatrick, who described a “project method” of teaching which organized learning around student-generated topics and focused on ensuring that the experience was collaborative and purposeful (Kilpatrick, 1918); some locate the origins of the modern PBL movement in the development of problem-based medical education (Merritt et al., 2017); others look to the work of Blumenfeld et al. in their seminal 1991 Educational Psychologist article. As these authors defined it, PBL is “a comprehensive perspective focused on teaching by engaging students in investigation,” with every project having “a question or problem that serves to organize and drive activities; and these activities result in a series of artifacts, or products, that culminate in a final product that addresses the driving question” (p. 371).
While definitions of PBL have multiplied in recent years, most have built on this anchoring idea that projects must have a driving question which launches an inquiry process whose outcome is represented by learning artifacts (Chen & Yang, 2019; Grossman et al., 2021). To this, contemporary PBL practitioners have added components such as fieldwork experiences, cycles of critique and revision, and the presence of authentic audiences during exhibitions (Berger, 2003; Berger et al. 2016; Kluver & Robin, 2021; Turk & Berman, 2018). Such practices have been codified by major PBL support providers, most prominently PBLWorks (run via the Buck Institute of Education), whose resources are anchored in a framework for “gold standard PBL,” seen in Figure 1, below (Buck Institute for Education, 2019).
Design Elements of Gold Standard PBL.
A second framework for “high-quality PBL” was developed in 2018, with six criteria for projects: 1) intellectual challenge and accomplishment, 2) authenticity, 3) public products, 4) collaboration, 5) project management, and 5) reflection (Vander Ark & Liebtag, 2018). These various conceptualizations of PBL, as with situated learning theory and writing on the applications of constructivism to teaching, do not take an ideological stance on what types of questions should be investigated or what lenses should be used to investigate them. Indeed, the only reference to the role of moral or political values in PBL is Krajcik and Shin’s (2014) assertion that driving questions should be “ethical, in that they do no harm to individuals, organisms, or the environment” (p. 281). The only response to PBL’s neutrality is a 2021 blog post by scholar-educator Dr. Kaleb Rashad, in which he articulates “six equity stances of liberatory PBL” developed by himself and colleagues at the High Tech High Graduate School of Education. There is little evidence that this framework has been taken up or even noticed by many PBL scholars or practitioners, but later in the article I will argue that it most certainly should be.
PBL’s Compatibility with Capitalism
As described earlier, PBL and PBL-adjacent approaches have become increasingly popular in U.S. public schools (Mehta & Fine, 2019). During this same period, the relationship between PBL and corporate-philanthropic interests has strengthened, with philanthropies such as the Hewlett Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, and Lucas Educational Research investing in PBL-related research, development, and innovation. Widening the conceptualization of PBL to include adjacent approaches—e.g., those which similarly draw on situated learning theory and emphasize voice, choice, and authentic work—reveals an even wider set of investments from funders such as the Charles Koch Foundation and the Chick-fil-A Foundation. Finally, as alluded to earlier, PBL features prominently as one of President-elect Trump’s “Ten Principles for Great Education Leading to Great Jobs.” “President Trump will support project-based learning inside the classroom to help train students for fulfilling work outside the classroom,” it reads (www.donaldjtrump.com, n.d.).
The most common stated rationale for corporate and corporate-philanthropic interest in PBL is that PBL and PBL-adjacent experiences prioritize the skills that the 21st century knowledge economy requires of its workers: collaboration, communication, creativity, and complex thinking (Mehta & Fine, 2015; Trilling & Fadel, 2012). Helping young people to develop these skills is undeniably important, especially given longstanding patterns by which linguistically and culturally marginalized students encounter a pedagogy of poverty (Ladson-Billings, 2014). A more skeptical way to view PBL’s compatibility with corporate and right-wing interests, however, lies in the fact that PBL promises to equip young people with economically valued 21st century skills without asking them to engage in radical or transformative discourses. To this end, the PBLWorks site and several other sites which offer guidance for educators seeking to organize instruction around PBL-adjacent approaches provide guidance about high-interest, developmentally appropriate, standards-aligned project ideas, but in very few cases do these ideas encourage educators to engage students in power analysis (see, e.g., edutopia.org, https://teachempowered.org/, https://realworldlearning.org/pblworks.org). Arguably, this content neutrality opens up PBL for capitalist cooptation, allowing it to serve a status quo system that seeks “maximum returns on investment in public schooling for private industry” (Magill & Rodriguez, 2017, pp. 1–2).
A final point of interest is that PBL’s emphasis on the development of material artifacts makes it highly compatible with capitalist notions of production. To be fair, materiality is compelling on a number of levels. It enables teachers to provide models that anchor the project in a destination (Fehrenbacher, 2017); it invites students to develop an ethos of craftsmanship (Berger, 2003); and it can serve as a powerful way to ensure that a school’s walls reinforce the values of powerful learning (Mehta & Fine, 2019). And yet it is still true that in a capitalist world, the myopic focus on producing value via the creation of monetizable products can serve to devalue the intangible work of political, social, and spiritual change (Hersey, 2022; Horton & Freire, 1990). This, I believe, is one of the core tensions within PBL: the focus on producing material artifacts is compelling, but without attention and caution on the part of educators, it can predispose the work away from liberatory purposes.
Critical Pedagogy and Its Critique of Capitalist Logic
Whereas PBL draws on the work of Dewey for inspiration, critical pedagogy looks to the work of Brazilian philosopher-educator Paulo Freire. Born into a working-class family during a period of recession and instability, Freire sought to unravel the interlocking systems of colonialism and capitalism, which he viewed as responsible for the plight of oppressed peoples worldwide. Famously, in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire & Ramos, 1970), Freire identified schools as a driver of social reproduction via their “banking” method, in which learners are viewed as objects rather than agents and are compelled to memorize and regurgitate decontextualized state-sanctioned knowledge. As an antidote to this model, Freire outlined a vision of problem-posing education, in which learners would be invited to draw on their own and each others’ experiences in order to understand themselves in relation to the economic and political systems that framed their lives. Freire theorized that this process of conscientização (the development of critical consciousness) would empower learners to take action in service of pursuing transformative change, from which they would learn even more about themselves and the world—a continual cycle of action and reflection known as praxis. Freire’s philosophy is deeply Marxist in its formulation. Although his writings touch on questions of racism, patriarchy, and the conjoined legacies of colonialism and slavery, social class remains at the center, with Freire returning again and again to the question of how working-class people might reclaim agency, well-being, and spiritual wholeness when capitalism relies on depriving them of all three (Kohan, 2021; McLaren & Kincheloe, 2007).
Unlike neo-Deweyan thought, critical pedagogy has remained unwaveringly anticapitalist, taking as one of its foundations the belief that “capitalism defaces the ontological meaning of what it means to be human” (McLaren, 2017, pp. xviii–xix). To this end, American scholars such as Henry Giroux and Jeff Duncan-Andrade have sought to draw Freire’s conception of critical pedagogy into conversation with the ways that the logic of U.S. racial capitalism deprive both educators and young people of their humanity (Duncan-Andrade & Milner, 2022; Magill & Rodriguez, 2017). Advocates of critical pedagogy share much with critical race theorists in education, who assert that children must be supported to encounter the unvarnished history of U.S. chattel slavery and its ongoing socio-political and economic repercussions (Kendi, 2017). To this end, recent work on critical pedagogy has focused specifically on awakening young people to the persistence of structural racism in the United States, including the entwined ideologies and economic structures which originated with the transatlantic slave trade and became encoded in the system of American racial capitalism that exists today (Morales-Doyle & Gutstein, 2019; Robinson, 2019; Robinson et al., 1983).
There is no framework that specifies what the elements or practices of “gold standard” critical pedagogy might be. This is a source of frustration to some novice educators, who often are ignited by Freiran ideas in their preparation programs only to find that there are scant resources to guide them in actualizing these ideas at a day-to-day level (Pittard, 2015). A number of scholars and educators have sought to address this theory-to-practice dilemma (Duncan-Andrade & Morrell, 2008), with several promising developments related to offering teachers support in teaching ethnic studies, a field that draws on the work of Freire and other critical scholars (Curammeng, 2022). There are also localized efforts to support teachers in learning to lead youth participatory action research (YPAR), a praxeological approach through which teachers guide young people in inquiring systematically into local problems and taking action in service of positive change (M. Fine & Torre, 2021; Mirra et al., 2015). YPAR, arguably, represents critical pedagogy’s most well-specified pedagogical approach. In its emphasis on positioning students as researchers who apply their learning via political action, YPAR aligns to situated learning and constructivist theory. Unfortunately, however, YPAR and critical pedagogy more broadly continue to occupy a marginal position in the broader discourses of school reform. As critical scholar Peter McLaren writes: Critical pedagogy is about as discernible on today’s educational horizon as a mote of dust in a dust storm . . . while the reach of transnational capitalism, which has colonized almost every social group on the planet, remains virtually unquestioned (McLaren, 2017, p. xviii).
Methodology
This paper seeks to deepen the conversation about the potential for schools to achieve equity via PBL and PBL-like learning opportunities. To this end, the paper asks: Why and in what range of ways does capitalist logic show up in some PBL experiences? What can the tradition of critical pedagogy offer to PBL in relation to disrupting capitalist logic? As stated earlier, these questions are not mainly empirical, and, as such, this is not a mainly empirical paper. However, in the following section I continue my exploration of the first research question by exploring four cases which illustrate a continuum of ways in which PBL might engage with capitalist logic. In the remainder of this section, I discuss the data sources and analytic process which resulted in the selection of the cases, as well as my own positionality in relation to the article’s throughlines.
Zeroing in on a Topic for Inquiry
The insights and perspectives that lie at the heart of this article began as an informal but insistent noticing about the presence of capitalist logic within certain PBL experiences. In my interwoven capacities as an educator, teacher-educator, and scholar with an enduring commitment to transforming schools into spaces where all students regularly experience deep learning, I have spent 20 years working with and within schools and school-systems which have commitments to authentic and student-centered learning. In my empirical research, which is mainly ethnographic in nature, I have studied attempts to make learner-centered transformations in more than 40 North American schools and/or school districts, including in a number school-networks with explicit commitments to PBL (See S. M. Fine & Mehta, 2024; Mehta & Fine, 2019, for examples.) As the former director of a teacher preparation program situated within a network of PBL schools, I also have spent hundreds of hours supervising preservice teachers as they learned to teach in PBL settings. Finally, as the parent of children who attend PBL schools, I have attended countless project-related field trips and exhibitions. It was as the result of my engagement across all three of these domains that my “spidey-sense” began to prickle in relation to the presence of capitalist logic.
Assembling the Data Set
Although qualitative methodologists counsel researchers to attend to their intuition and hunches as an early form of pattern recognition (Lareau, 2021; Lawrence-Lightfoot, 2005; Maxwell, 2012), I knew that I would need a formal way to document and analyze the phenomenon in question. Thus, in preparing to write this article, I began the process of aggregating relevant examples of capitalist logic at work within PBL. This process involved identifying and compiling an eclectic set of data sources into a single data-set. As a first step, I returned to my field-notes from one previous research project and two in-process research projects and pulled out all examples of PBL experiences where core project activities engaged in some way with capitalist logic. In line with the rationale provided earlier in this paper, I adopted an expansive working definition of PBL, considering learning experiences which broadly emphasized “learning by doing” and which included at least four of the seven design elements associated with the PBLWorks definition of Gold Standard PBL. After reviewing literature on capitalism, I defined “engagement with capitalist logic” as the inclusion of one or more of the following: 1) learning about, simulating, analyzing, or engaging directly in the activities of free market capitalism; 2) designing and/or producing artifacts to be sold for a profit; 3) competing for scarce resources; 4) engaging in entrepreneurial activities, and 5) exploring the role of the free market and the economy in relation to issues of public concern. From across the fieldnotes and artifacts from the three projects listed above, I identified seven total examples of PBL experiences which met one or more of these inclusion criteria.
Because my focus also includes the public guidance that the field currently provides to PBL practitioners, I then conducted a review of major public-domain PBL resources, focusing on those which include extensive curriculum materials and/or textured accounts (narrative or video) of projects and project-adjacent learning experiences in action. Specifically, I reviewed content on the following sites: PBLWorks (https://www.pblworks.org/), Edutopia (https://www.edutopia.org/), Unboxed Learning (https://hthunboxed.org), Real World Learning (https://realworldlearning.org/), Junior Achievement USA (https://jausa.ja.org/), and Empowered (https://teachempowered.org/). In total, this search yielded 17 project experiences which met one or more of the criteria listed above. Thus, in total across my own proprietary data and the publicly available data, I identified 24 projects which included one or more element of capitalist logic.
Data Analysis
Using AtlasTI, I began the process of coding this data set. With the goal of “developing descriptive categories or researcher abstractions” (Örnek, 2008; Steck & Perry, 2017, p. 334), I conducted iterative processes of open coding and focused coding, gradually identifying clusters of projects which shared underlying relationships to the capitalist logic. After multiple iterations, I finalized the categories which I explore below: projects which endorse capitalist logic (n = 3), projects which normalize capitalist logic (n = 12), projects which adapt capitalist logic (n = 6), and projects which critique capitalist logic (n = 3). Finally, I selected one project example from within each of these four groups which best captured the essence of the category. Seeking to minimize the variation associated with developmental stage, and recognizing that elementary teachers contend with a specific set of developmental considerations, all of these example cases involve preadolescent and/or adolescent students in grades 6–12. The example cases reflect my choice to rely on an approach that resembles theoretical sampling (Conlon et al., 2020), in which data is selected to explore the contours of an undertheorized problem-space rather than to make claims about generalizability (Charmaz, 2006). The data sources for each of the cases are summarized in Table 1. In three cases, I had fieldnotes and interview data related to projects for which there are also public-domain resources.
Data Sources for Four Empirical Cases
Limitations
As can be seen in Table 1, the depth and range of the data associated with each case are widely varied. The Youth Entrepreneurs Project case, for example, relies on relatively limited qualitative data (a review of curriculum materials and student work along with a single interview with the lead teacher), compared to multiple days of participant-observation and other ethnographic activities in the XONR8 Project case. As a result, my account of the Youth Entrepreneurs Project is less textured than the other cases, and it is possible that my “reading” of the project might have been different had I had the opportunity to spend more time observing the enacted curriculum. That said, I selected the Youth Entrepreneurs case specifically because it shared a number of attributes with other examples of projects which normalized capitalism, including several other “kid business” projects which are featured on curriculum guidance websites such as PBLWorks.
It is also worth noting that my initial reviews of my own data as well as public-domain resources revealed a range of alternative logics that might undergird PBL experiences. Projects which draw on logic from the arts might ask students to explore what it means to be human from an aesthetic and expressive perspective; projects which look to the natural sciences might ask students to engage in disciplined inquiry into the nature of the physical universe; projects which engage with the social sciences might ask students to capture the human experience as situated within social, political, cultural, and economic contexts. Exploring such examples is beyond the scope of this paper, but will be well worth the effort for PBL educators seeking to enlarge their imagination for what it might look like to find sources of curricular authenticity that lie beyond monetization, competition, entrepreneurship, and other capitalist tropes.
Positionality
Although I did not recognize it at the time, my deep skepticism toward American neoliberal capitalism was catalyzed by the 2016 presidential election. In the wake of Donald Trump’s first victory, many Americans wept; some knitted pink hats and marched. My spouse, who has a background in environmental policy but who had spent the previous decade running a small nonprofit technology company, skipped the knitting and leaped into action. Within months of the inauguration, he had dropped everything, including most of his income, to work on the climate crisis via political organizing and ballot measures—work which he has continued ever since.
Several years into this process, we found ourselves in the middle of yet another argument about money. I was proud of the work that my spouse was doing, but I felt uneasy about the pressure it put on our finances. The reality was that we were not actually in any kind of financial trouble—a fact that reflects the unearned privilege we hold as White, able-bodied, English-speaking, college-educated Americans with access to generational wealth. Still, I was unsettled by the idea that my spouse had spent almost half a decade working for practically no compensation. For his part, my spouse was angry at the insinuation that the lack of monetization equated to a lack of worth. “Just because capitalism doesn’t value what I’m trying to do doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have value!” he shouted. His words stopped me in my tracks. For once, I could find no rejoinder—because I knew that he was right. For all my own espoused progressivism, I was still holding onto capitalist logic.
As this story might suggest, this article reflects my own journey of conscientização. Although I have long been skeptical of the free market’s role in relation to addressing social inequality, only in the past decade have I fully leaned into the work of reading the world through explicitly anticapitalist lenses. In this, I share much with the young people of Generation Z, who in recent years report feeling more negatively about capitalism than any previous generation (Lemon, 2021). Perhaps this is why I find myself writing with such fire: it reflects the zeal of the recently converted, as well as the gestalt of the current moment. I do not, however, believe that this zeal will abate; the possibilities opened by imagining a society which rejects the entwined perspectives of White supremacy and neoliberal reform are too compelling to turn from at a moment where the status quo invites despair.
Empirical Examples: Tracing a Continuum of Capitalist Logic Within PBL
I now turn to four projects which illuminate a range of ways that PBL might engage with capitalist logic. As described above, these examples trace the contours of a continuum which ranges from the endorsement of capitalist logic, to the normalization of capitalist logic, to the adaptation of capitalist logic, and finally to the critique of capitalist logic. In Table 2, I attempt to summarize the qualities that might characterize projects in each of these four categories. The latter category, I will argue, is the only one which fully illustrates the concept of critical PBL.
A Continuum of Capitalist Logic within PBL
In crafting these cases, I have chosen to downplay the role of the educators in question, focusing more on the explicit and implicit messages associated with each project’s core educative tasks. This is not only because I wish to protect human subjects but also because I seek to shift accountability away from individuals and onto systems, a stance which is compatible with that of critical theorists who insist that individual accountability and individual growth are not sufficient to produce transformative social change (Love, 2023). In addition, for the two projects which do not have publicly available data (the Youth Entrepreneurs Project and the Reducing Poverty Project) I have altered and/or omitted details in order to de-identify the people and places in question.
Endorsing Capitalism: The BizTown Project
The first example to be taken up is the Biztown project—an example which illustrates what it looks like when a project unapologetically endorses capitalist logic. Since the project was described in the opening of the paper, I will move directly into analysis, which begins with noting that from the perspective of learner engagement and 21st century skills (Jacobson-Lundeberg, 2013), the BizTown project might be seen as a spectacular success. To this end, the project touched on topics about which preteens are primed to be curious (Whitlock, 2019); it connected school to the broader world and to students’ possible future selves; it included opportunities for literacy and numeracy development; and it offered choice along with moments of student leadership (Berger et al., 2014). It is certainly hard to imagine an eleven-year-old disliking the experience. From a critical perspective, however, the project’s hidden curriculum (Jackson, 1968)—though frankly it does not seem very well hidden—is deeply troubling. Even setting aside the role of corporate sponsorship and ways that the simulation conveniently ignored the realities of wage inequality and racially stratified workforce participation, the project was positively saturated with capitalist logic. The messages that students were exposed to during the project, for example, can be summarized as follows: The reason to work is because you earn a paycheck that allows you to buy things. The reason to follow rules is because you will be fined and shamed if you do not. The reason to recycle is because it will help you win the contest.
BizTown is an extreme example of how PBL might explicitly endorse capitalist logic. It is also an example of how corporate actors—which in this case include both Junior Achievement USA and the local businesses which support its operation—can co-opt “real world” learning for their own ends. The project serves to highlight the seductive appeal of using profit, consumerism, entrepreneurship, competition, meritocracy, and other capitalist tropes to engage students. To return to the point made above, however, this critique is not to suggest that the teachers in question were mainly at fault. Perhaps they were unaware of the project’s subterranean messages; at very least, they were less interested in these messages than in the ways the project promised to enliven their classrooms. This inattentiveness is not so much a failure on the teachers’ part as a symptom of the fact that capitalist logic has been normalized to the point of invisibility. (For more on BizTown and the history of propagandistic free market simulations, see Ventura, 2024.)
Normalizing Capitalism: The Youth Entrepreneurs Project
In this project, ninth-grade students spent three months engaging in an entrepreneurship project which began with the question, “How can we plan and create financially viable businesses?” Over the course of the first months, the students read about famous entrepreneurs ranging from Henry Ford to Bill Gates to Oprah; later, they had the chance to talk with a local business leader about her experiences. The students then formed groups of three, decided on a product they wanted to develop, created a working prototype, engaged in a cycle of critique and feedback with a “focus group” of peers, revised their product design, came up with a business plan which accounted for their overhead costs as well as open-market pricing, designed a logo and advertisement for their business, and finally produced their products. Throughout, student groups kept track of their progress using an interactive task-management tool used by designers. The project culminated in a pop-up “market day” during lunch where students sold their products to their peers and teachers. Profits were donated to the school’s Associated Student Body.
The Youth Entrepreneurs project departs in several important ways from the BizTown project: the project did not rely on corporate sponsorship, nor did it explicitly extol the virtues of the free market; the project positioned learners as collaborators rather than as competitors; and the dollars raised by students were directed toward a communal good. In aggregate, these components serve to soften some of the ways that the project engaged with capitalist logic, removing the quality of direct endorsement found in the BizTown project. From a critical perspective, however, the project was still entangled in capitalist tropes. First, the project valorized capitalism’s winners (Ford, Gates, Oprah) without attending to the systemic conditions that produce spectacular success for the few while depriving the many of basic freedoms. Second, the project’s culminating activity required pay-to-play participation. Third, the project gauged success as much by the funds raised as by the student thinking on display. Finally, writ large, the project normalized free enterprise, teaching students only how to participate in the free market, rather than also engaging them in critiquing it.
Adapting Capitalism: The Reducing Poverty Project
The Reducing Poverty project, undertaken by sixth-grade students, encompassed many of the same activities as those described above, but did so within a framework which positioned student businesses within a broader social context. In this, the project drew on the specific logics of social entrepreneurship, a framework for “sustainable business” which has gained traction recently as a capitalist-humanitarian response to social and environmental problems (Baltador & Grecu, 2023, p. 37). Social entrepreneurship does not reject capitalist logic, but rather adapts it, taking the pragmatic stance that those seeking to produce positive social change must work within capitalist systems.
The Reducing Poverty Project began with an introduction to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and a class vote in which students identified poverty as an issue about which they wanted to take action. For several weeks, the class spent time exploring the challenges and impacts of poverty within their community. They connected with a local nonprofit organization which worked to address and reduce poverty by running a food bank and clothing depot as well as job training programs. They also had a chance to speak with several formerly unhoused adults who now serve as advocates for issues related to homelessness. Galvanized by these experiences, the class decided that their goal would be to raise awareness about poverty—and to raise money to donate to the nonprofit. With a social purpose and a charitable partner in place, the class launched into the project’s entrepreneurship experience. This experience looked very much like the Youth Entrepreneurs project. Students broke into small groups, each of which was tasked with imagining, designing, and executing a business plan. Some students 3D-printed plastic keychains; others designed and printed water-bottle stickers. All parts of the process, including market research, product development, graphic design, and event planning, were student-run. By the end of the project, the class had raised a significant amount of money for the nonprofit—and they had gained a belief in their collective capacity to act on pressing social issues.
Analyzing the Reducing Poverty project from a critical pedagogical lens reveals more promise than do the two projects discussed earlier. To the credit of the teachers who designed it, the project made a deliberate effort to situate learning within the context of contemporary socio-political issues and to treat student artifacts as a vehicle for raising public awareness of a social problem. Plus, rather than simply learning decontextualized entrepreneurial skills such as workflow management and business planning, students emerged with situated knowledge related to a specific issue as it was playing out in their community. In aggregate, these qualities helped students to see themselves as agentic in relation to pressing social problems that might previously have struck them as abstract and/or insurmountable. Thus, by comparison to both the BizTown project and the Student Entrepreneurs project, the Reducing Poverty project downplayed some of capitalism’s values, such as the focus on material consumption and the equating of artifact production with human worth.
In the end, however, the core activities of the project reverted back to the logic of capitalism. First, the project ultimately still relied on the commodification and monetization of learning artifacts. It is hard to imagine that the students’ sense of accomplishment did not include the fact that they had met their fundraising goals! Second, the project tacitly endorsed the practice of raising money from individuals, rather than engaging in political advocacy and direct democracy, as a way to address structural inequality. Third, and relatedly, the project normalized the neoliberal idea that nongovernmental organizations should take on the burden of solving deep-rooted social issues produced and exacerbated by governmental policy. Finally, the project asked students to engage in a do for approach to social change; students were asked to consider the plight of unhoused people living within their own community, but they did so mainly at arm’s length, taking a stance that centered sympathy rather than collective action. The Reducing Poverty Project thus began to approach critical PBL, but stopped short of asking students to critique the economic and sociopolitical arrangements which produce homelessness in the first place.
Critiquing Capitalism: The XONR8 Project
“Is the U.S. justice system just?” This was the driving question that students explored in the XONR8 project, which was undertaken in an eleventh-grade humanities classroom. During the first weeks of the project, students explored the origins of the U.S. prison-industrial complex, took a tour of a local prison facility, spoke with a recent exoneree, and began the process of reading and discussing Just Mercy, Bryan Stevenson’s 2015 memoir about working as a death row lawyer. They also took a trip to meet with staff at the organization that served as the project’s community partner: a local chapter of the Innocence Project, a nonprofit which provides pro bono legal counsel to those who have been wrongfully convicted of crimes. The students then began the task that lay at the project’s heart: completing the pre-review process for some of the many petitions that the Innocence Project receives each year. As a whole class, the students learned to navigate the world of legalese by working together on an already-resolved “training case”; they then broke into smaller groups to read, analyze, and evaluate pending case files. Eventually, students returned to the Innocence Project’s headquarters to present their cases along with their recommendations for whether each case merited further review. The lawyers listened and offered feedback to each group. Finally, the students wrote essays in which they tackled the project’s essential question using evidence from their own experiences, the texts they had read, and the cases they had worked on. Although these essays ranged widely in sophistication, almost all of them took a stand on the injustice inherent in a profit-driven and racist carceral system.
The design parameters of the XONR8 project are, like the other examples in this paper, highly aligned to the features of traditional PBL: a complex question, opportunities to learn beyond school walls, academic skill-building, sustained collaboration, cycles of critique and revision, real-world audiences, and extended reflection. Beyond this, however, the XONR8 project represents a significant departure from the emphasis on entrepreneurship and monetization found in the other examples. Indeed, money and profit played no direct role in the enactment of this project. These things were instead treated as something to examine and critique; for example, one of the many topics that students explored was the ways in which the privatized prison system profits off of high rates of incarceration. The project was grounded in a focus on the human toll of oppressive systems—a deeply Freirean emphasis. In talking with a recent exoneree, for example, students were forced to contend with the ways that incarceration dehumanizes the innocent and the guilty alike, reducing people to their most desperate moments and/or to the “crime” of living in a Black or brown body in a white supremacist society. Finally, in working as interns-of-sorts to the Innocence Project lawyers, students took on the role of apprentices who could contribute to addressing a pressing dilemma (the pileup of letters from incarcerees), rather than the role of fundraisers or sympathizers-from-afar. The lawyers, for their part, chose to take on an educative role, giving their time and expertise as a way to live into their organization’s emphasis on community engagement. This enactment of apprenticeship and partnership is not only aligned to the goals of Freirian praxis, but also to the original formulation of situated learning theory.
It is worth noticing that the XONR8 project did not turn entirely away from questions related to career opportunities and economic survival. The project offered students a rare opportunity to dip their toes into a possible future career—the world of public interest law—and to explore the role of nonprofit legal aid in addressing systemic racism. Of course, some students developed such a sharp critical awareness that they began to question the role of nonprofits in the system altogether. (“If the U.S. justice system was just, the Innocence Project wouldn’t need to exist,” one student wrote, convincingly, in her final essay.) But I would argue that this is evidence that the project had successfully invited this student to both “read the word” and “read the world,” developing understandings of society as it is while also beginning to imagine what it could become—a combination that can help to support young people who can engage in praxis.
Toward a Theory of Critical PBL
What might explain the presence of capitalist logic in some “real world learning” experiences? The most obvious answer is that in the context of a capitalist society which lacks a social safety net, financial capital is the most obvious form of power. Those who do not have enough financial capital suffer; those who do have enough can access housing, healthcare, and higher education, which in turn allow for career opportunities, leisure time, the ability to acquire some of the market’s many goodies, and the possibility of creating generational wealth. With this in mind, it is easy to understand why the skills and mindsets associated with entrepreneurship, financial literacy, advertising, business-sense, competition, and sales provide such an obvious way for educators to infuse learning experiences with authenticity. These things are indeed authentic to the world in which we live, and they can be connected directly to issues of social mobility. Most tantalizing of all for educators, perhaps, is the fact that students are quick to recognize these connections. As my eight-year-old son retorted when I (gently) questioned the values driving a class project which was in many respects similar to the Youth Entrepreneurs Project: “But Mommy, money makes it real!”
This article does not take issue with the underlying fact that schools serve an economic purpose within U.S. society. It is not antithetical to the goals of liberation and social justice, in my view, to assert that schools have an obligation to help young people understand and navigate the world as it currently exists—including teaching them how the current economy works, the skills and dispositions that it prizes, and the ways to position themselves as agents within it. To do otherwise disproportionately benefit high-cultural-capital students whose families impart such knowledge to them as a matter of course (Delpit, 2006). But teaching about capitalism is different from endorsing it, normalizing it, or resigning to its permanence. To put this argument in Freirian terms, educators have an obligation both to teach their students things that are pragmatically useful (e.g. teaching them to “read the word”) and to engage them in problem-posing analysis that leads to transformative understandings of themselves and the sociopolitical realities that frame their lives (teaching them to “read the world”). To do the latter without the former is to fail to provide students with adequate tools by which to navigate the world as it is; to do the former without the latter is to assume that there is no hope for liberation and social transformation. The “read the word without reading the world” approach—grounded in a cynical view which resigns itself to the realities of oppression and seeks only to increase the chances that more young people might join the ranks of capitalism’s winners—is painfully dominant in U.S. education, including in PBL classrooms. But, as examples such as the XONR8 project suggest, it does not have to be.
How might the field close the loopholes which allow PBL to be co-opted by capitalist logic and move more fully toward a vision of critical PBL? Said differently, what might it take for educators to embrace and enact an instructional vision which marries the imperative to engage young people in active, hands-on, experiential learning with the imperative to equip them with the tools to recognize, critique, resist, and transform the oppressive systems that frame and constrain their lives?
One answer to this question involves leveraging what already exists within schools and school systems—e.g., seaming together the spaces where educators are enacting projects with those where educators are striving to enact critical pedagogy. In the context of large comprehensive high schools, for example, current trends mean that there are most likely educators involved in “real world” learning initiatives of some type, perhaps within career and technical education programs or elective courses; current trends also mean, at least in states such as California which actively promote critical and culturally responsive pedagogy, that there are likely ethnic studies courses and/or civic education courses which focus on building sociopolitical consciousness. Under the right conditions, educators from these too-often separate worlds could be supported to understand and appreciate each other’s work, and to begin the process of cross-pollinating in ways that could imbue “real world” learning experiences with greater criticality while also perhaps encouraging ethnic studies to remember the importance of authentic audiences and learning-by-doing. Given the persistent traditions of departmental and programmatic siloing within schools, especially secondary schools (Mehta & Fine, 2019), this kind of collaboration is by no means low-hanging fruit. It is nevertheless powerful for system and school leaders to remember that they likely have assets within their system related to both PBL and critical pedagogy—assets which might be leveraged in service of a more coherent and unified vision of powerful learning.
It is perhaps a research article cliche to argue that teacher and leader preparation programs need to undergo a shift. Cliche or not, it is true in this case. As explored earlier, the theory and practices of PBL evolved from a very different set of theorists and situations than those of critical pedagogy. The resulting division persists broadly within the field and plays out writ small within educator preparation programs, where coursework devoted to topics such as active learning, experiential learning, and PBL are often fully separate from courses devoted to social justice and critical consciousness. Pursuing a vision of critical PBL would require the architects of and instructors within these programs to overcome this siloing.
As a foundation for all such work, there must be a revision to the frameworks and resources that educators look to when designing and facilitating projects—a revision which breaks the silence with respect to the imperative for criticality within PBL and which can serve as a new anchoring text for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers alike. With this in mind, I would like to reengage with the work of Dr. Kaleb Rashad, a critical educator who has served as a PBL school principal, system leader, and professional learning provider. As described earlier, in a 2021 blog post, Rashad articulated a framework for “six equity stances of liberatory PBL,” developed by himself along with colleagues at the Center for Love and Justice at the High Tech High Graduate School of Education. Although PBLWorks and other providers have over the past few years added some guidance about how to embed equity within PBL (see, for example https://www.pblworks.org/blog/4-equity-levers-project-based-learning), there is little evidence that Rashad’s framework has become part of the conversation about the future of applied learning. I argue that it most certainly should be.
Rashad’s framework offers its six equity stances not as a replacement for the original PBL design elements, but as a complementary set of lenses and considerations which can help to ensure that projects support the goal of conscientização rather than reproducing oppressive beliefs systems. As Rashad writes in the blog’s accompanying narrative, the framework, represented below in Figure 2, draws on the work of Freire, hooks, Duncan-Andrade, Ladson-Billings, and many others who have theorized educational freedom. Rashad’s framework does not call out capitalism by name—but it does not need to. Its emphasis on interconnectedness, relationships to the land, diverse ways of being and knowing, and resistance to systems of domination are all posited in clear opposition to capitalist logic and values. Neither the Biztown Project, nor the Youth Entrepreneurs Project, nor the Reducing Poverty project, holds up to this set of lenses. More to the point, perhaps, is that this framework offers a powerful way to imagine how such projects might be transformed to more fully align to the goals of educational justice.
Six Equity Stances of Liberatory PBL (Rashad, 2021).
I do not offer Rashad’s framework as the best or only way to conceptualize critical PBL. There are certainly many other possibilities, some of which might draw on the work of specific critical pedagogy theorists and others of which may not yet be imagined. Instead, I offer the framework to rouse educators to the possibility of birthing a new movement for “real world” learning—one looks unflinchingly at the beauty and the brokenness of our world, and insists that educators and young people together can become what status quo forces fear most: radical dreamers who marry thought and action in service of creating a more just world for all.
Footnotes
Notes
Author
SARAH M. FINE is an assistant professor of education studies at the University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, Mail Code 0070, La Jolla, CA 92093-0070; email: