There is so much of misuse of terminology in education as in any other field. An educational theory or a practice gets oversimplified, then banalised then distorted. If a few decades ago, every school spoke of providing a holistic education, today there are speaking of project based learning.We have been doing project in my school  for years and each time, we have had to redefine and polish up the concept of a project. For us, a project is something that the children concretely undertake that is linked to real life and has a usable output. A project has to be meaningful.Thus making diagrams or sticking pictures on a chart paper is not a project. It can be only an activity. Similarly, researching for information on the net is not a project either. How is making a chart paper useful? It cannot be the end in itself. A child knows that most activities are nothing but arid academic exercise and that their work is only going to get shelved.

With the pressures of the new NCERT curriculum, teachers give home network to do at home that they call projects. A few years ago, one teacher had asked 4^th graders to make models of their rooms at home. (for the record, model-making by itself cannot be a project either. It has to lead to something that will be used).

So, children completed the models and got them to class. Amongst the class group, there was a child who not only lost interest in the ensuring activities but completely switched off and refused to even participate in the class anymore. It was after a great deal of discussion that the teacher learnt that the parents had ended up doing the project so that their child’s was the best work in class. Since the child never did the work, there is no sense of ownership and no interest. Moreover, when a parent ends up doing the child’s work, it means that the child was not capable of doing it. This only lowers the self-esteem of the child. So teachers have to ensure that they do not focus on completion of activities but rather on the processes and that has to be done in class.

So what is a useful project? It can be designing systems of recycling, creating awareness projects, working with communities, improving one’s surrounding at school or in the community by creating art work, making a gadget that user solar energy, making the school newspaper, a podcast, doing rain water harvesting… the list can go on.

The other issue related to project work in the attitude of teachers. A parent was narrating how a child spent hours on the so called project given by the teacher. It was a real labour of love and he went and so proudly gave it to his teacher. The teacher did not even look at the child, leave alone the project. She just nodded and put it aside. For her, the child had completed the work and her job was done. But the child wanted some recognition and feedback in his work. He becomes so demotivated that he refuses to participate in class activities anymore.

So schools need to understand what is a project and why are they doing it. Similarly, parents need to help only when a child asks for help and teachers need to be genuinely engaged when dealing with the children and their work. Otherwise, you are going to put off the child from the work forever.