Problem-Based Learning and Sustainable Education: Addressing the Problem of Isolation

• In Event: Celebrating 50 Years of Problem-Based Learning: Past, Present, and Future

Abstract

Purpose of the Study
PBL has been established as an innovative educational approach from the 1960s onwards and is practiced in 500 higher education institutions all over the world (Schmidt, Van der Molen, Te Winkel, & Wijnen, 2009). In this paper we argue, that the time has come for a new update of PBL, which takes a long-term perspective: the perspective of sustainable education.

Theoretical Framework
Sustainable education is all the more pressing because we live in a demanding society, which is shown in high levels of stress and increasing burnout rates in students (Eflein, 2018). Sustainability “implies the survival, the security, and beyond these, the well-being of a whole system, whether this is seen at local level, such as community, or at global level” (Sterling, 2010, p. 512). In particular, we argue for the importance of responsibility for a shared world (see Arendt 1961, 1998).

Methods and Data Sources
In this theoretical paper, we address the “problem of isolation” of the education process within PBL.

Results
The “problem of isolation” occurs on three levels. The first problem of isolation is the information-processing model of PBL that still continues to inform many PBL curricula (Schmidt et al., 2009). It was first identified as the McMaster model of PBL (although no longer practiced at McMasters) and depends on general problem-solving skills with only minimal contextualization. As such, the information-process model incorrectly represents education as an isolated activity that leaves considerations of context behind. In contrast, the Maastricht model of PBL and the Danish model of PBL, practiced at the University of Aalborg, engage the importance of context respectively through activating of prior knowledge or by letting students take charge of their learning process.
Our second critique is that in all models of PBL, the focus lies on a series of separate problems by which knowledge acquisition occurs. It organizes education as a separate activity hardly connected to the world at large. Hannah Arendt (1961) diagnosed a similar phenomenon in the mid-twentieth century as students standing apart from the world because students have not been educated to share in the “common sense” of their own society (p. 175).
The final critique, from a wider societal perspective, concerns the existing culture of measurement and comparison that further strengthens the aforementioned isolating effects (Biesta, 2015). The criteria of measurement determine the purpose of education and encourage an isolated conception of education.

 
Scholarly Significance
PBL has the responsibility to educate students for their futures in a world held in common. This represents an enlargement of the scope of the community-orientation originally formulated as one of the educational principles of PBL (see Servant, 2016): from community to the shared world as a whole. The Arendtian (Arendt, 1961, 1998) framework of vita active offers us some suggestions the update of PBL and a direction for the avoidance of the problem of isolation. In adopting and further exploring the implications of responsibility for a shared world, PBL can be more successfully aligned with the goals of sustainable education.
 

Authors

• Gera Noordzij, Erasmus University

• Julien P. Kloeg, Erasmus University Rotterdam

• Liesbeth Noordegraaf-Eelens, Erasmus University Rotterdam