IN THIS CHAPTER we

Introduction

The overarching goal of this chapter is to present PBL as a pedagogical framework that has a long-established history and proven effectiveness in a wide variety of educational settings. Though missing the categorized pedagogy of modern project-based learning (PBL), instructors have promoted learning-by-doing since antiquity. Aristotle (ca. 384–322 bce) suggests that knowledge is often learned through repeated practice (ἕξις, hexis), making correct instruction essential to establish correct practice in the development of a virtuous person. Seneca (ca. 4 bce–65 ce) comments that his Roman ancestors “taught their children nothing that had to be learned while reclining,” lamenting that current educational practices often left young people as “starving vomiters who keep the body at the feeding trough while the mind grows feeble for lack of nourishment.” Augustine of Hippo (354–430 ce) famously states in On Christian Doctrine that education and theoretical learning are useful precisely because they aid experiential learning, offering the necessary skills to continually reinterpret the things of the world in order to attain divine knowledge. Once later medieval writers rediscovered Aristotle, they reinterpreted Aristotle's hexis as “habitus,” long-used to indicate learned behaviour. John of Salisbury (ca. 1120–1180 ce) recounts his own career as an arrogant student who, “with youthful lack of reflection, I unduly exaggerated my own knowledge. I took myself to be a young sage, inasmuch as I knew the answers to what I had been taught.” Later in his career, when he revisits these instructors, John notices that they are still posing the same questions, leading to the same production of arrogant youths because they have not pushed their pupils to act on what they have been taught, as John had taken it upon himself to do, that “It is easy for an artisan to talk about his art, but it is much more difficult to put the art into practice.” There has also been no small amount of discussion on the utilitarian curricula of medieval universities, such as the practical uses of disputatio for lawyers and canons. More recently, the use of habitus in educational scholarship has become a loaded term thanks to early twentieth-century sociological research on the nature of knowledge acquisition.