Project-Based Learning and the Humanities: Why Indian Schools Get This Wrong

The Problem With How Indian Schools Implement PBL

Walk into most Indian schools that claim to implement project-based learning in their humanities curriculum and you will find one of two things. Either you will find what might be called 'dessert PBL' — a project assigned at the end of a unit, after the content has already been taught through conventional instruction, as a way of applying what has been learned. Or you will find 'activity PBL' — a hands-on activity that produces a visible output (a poster, a model, a presentation) but does not require students to grapple with a genuine driving question, investigate multiple sources, or arrive at a defensible conclusion through their own inquiry.

Both of these are watered-down versions of what project-based learning actually is, and neither produces the deep learning, the transferable thinking skills, or the genuine student engagement that the research on well-implemented PBL demonstrates.

Genuine project-based learning, as defined by the Buck Institute for Education and the broader PBL research literature, is characterised by a sustained inquiry process driven by a challenging, open-ended question — a question that does not have a single correct answer, that requires investigation of multiple sources and perspectives, and that produces student work that is presented to an authentic audience and has genuine stakes beyond classroom marks.

What PBL in the Humanities Actually Requires

Humanities subjects — History, English Literature, Geography, Economics, Political Science, Sociology — are among the most naturally suited for genuine project-based learning, because the driving questions that the humanities address are inherently open-ended and contested. 'Was the partition of India avoidable?' 'How has migration shaped Mumbai?' 'What does financial inequality mean for democratic participation?' These are not questions with single correct answers that can be taught through content delivery and checked through recall tests. They are questions that require investigation, synthesis, and argument.

Genuine PBL in the humanities begins with one of these questions — not with content that students are then asked to make a project about. The driving question comes first, and the content investigation flows from it. Students who are genuinely trying to answer 'What did partition mean for families in Punjab?' need to read primary sources — oral histories, letters, accounts — not because they have been assigned to do so but because the evidence is what they need to answer the question.

The investigation phase in genuine PBL is guided but not directed. The teacher's role is to help students find and evaluate sources, to push back when their emerging arguments are poorly evidenced, and to ask the questions that deepen rather than shortcut the inquiry. This is a significantly more demanding teacher role than content delivery — it requires the teacher to be comfortable with uncertainty, with multiple legitimate answers, and with the reality that students sometimes arrive at conclusions that the teacher did not anticipate.

What Good PBL in Indian Humanities Classrooms Can Look Like

The following example is illustrative rather than prescriptive — it represents one way genuine PBL can be implemented in an Indian middle school humanities context.

A Grade 8 class in a school in a city with significant internal migration takes on the driving question: 'What does this city owe to the people who built it?' The question is open-ended, locally relevant, and requires investigation. Students investigate through multiple routes: oral history interviews with workers in local construction or manufacturing (conducted with appropriate permissions and support); reading of relevant documents and journalism; examination of local government policy on labour, housing, and services; and engagement with philosophical arguments about rights, obligations, and justice.

The project culminates not in a poster or a presentation to the teacher, but in a community exhibition — a public display of student research findings, open to parents, community members, and the workers whose experiences were investigated. The audience is real, the stakes are genuine, and the students' work has to stand on its own evidential and argumentative merits.

This kind of project is not more time-consuming than conventional humanities instruction if it replaces rather than supplements conventional instruction. It does require a teacher who is confident with open-ended inquiry, who can manage the emotional complexity of topics like labour rights and inequality, and who has the institutional support to take students out of the school building for community investigation. These are genuine requirements that explain why genuine PBL remains rare — not because it is impossible, but because it requires specific conditions that most Indian schools have not yet created.

Siksa For India's engagement with pedagogical practice in Indian schools includes support for educators who want to implement genuine inquiry-based learning in the humanities. For more, explore the Cognitive Science & Teaching category on this blog.

Sources

Krajcik, J. S., & Shin, N. (2014). Project-based learning. In R. K. Sawyer (Ed.), The Cambridge handbook of the learning sciences (2nd ed., pp. 275–297). Cambridge University Press.

Thomas, J. W. (2000). A review of research on project-based learning. Autodesk Foundation. Available at: http://www.bobpearlman.org/BestPractices/PBL_Research.pdf

Government of India. (2020). National Education Policy 2020. Ministry of Education. https://www.education.gov.in/nep/about-nep

Note: The Buck Institute for Education (now PBLWorks) is the primary organisation associated with the Gold Standard PBL framework referenced in this article. Their current resources are available at pblworks.org. The specific claim about NEP 2020 citing project-based learning is accurate; teachers should read the NEP 2020 document directly for the precise framing.