Chapter 18: Project-Based Learning and Contemplative Pedagogy: Tools for Molding the Heart and the Mind

Contemplative pedagogy and project-based learning holds the potential to cultivate greater compassion in learners at varied educational levels. Following review of the author’s teaching philosophy and literature on contemplative pedagogy to set the context, this work reflects upon the utility of project-based learning among adults and children in promoting compassion and other forms of contemplative outcomes.

The theoretical integration of Freire’s (1998) Pedagogy of Freedom and Bloom and Krathwohl’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives provide the framework for my teaching practice. Freire’s Pedagogy of Freedom makes the following assertions: (1) That teaching must involve learning from research, culture, and the students themselves; (2) that “to know how to teach is to create possibilities for the construction and production of knowledge rather than to be engaged simply in a game of transferring knowledge” (p. 49); and (3) that teaching is a human act and a “form of intervention in the world” (p. 49).