Case 1. The Red House at Georgetown University
The Red House is a driver of educational innovation at Georgetown University. Founded in 2013, the Red House serves as an institutional hub for incubating pedagogical experimentation through initiatives, programs, and multiple pilots at a structural level with the aim to embed these pilots into mainstream institutional structures. Our institutional structures are shaped by Jesuit educational values: caring for the whole person, meeting students where they are in the moment, and bringing an open heart to dialogue. Coupled with these Jesuit values, the Red House ethos is project-based in order to reimagine the learning environment for our students whether it is the core curriculum or new degree pathways or even a new campus within Georgetown.
Through its initiatives, the members of the Red House design and implement innovative programs that respond to the challenges facing higher education while also aiming to effectively and equitably benefit our students and society. In our work to infuse PBL into our institution’s structures, the driving assertion frames PBL as an inevitable learning paradigm, an inevitable framework for innovation. Our mandate allows us to operate at an institutional level making connections between and among the schools to embed PBL through strategic connections leading to more collaborative, interdisciplinary work. To date, the scope of PBL adoption happens in pockets across the schools within Georgetown. From these pockets of innovation, we are in an optimal position to initiate wide-scale adoption through curriculum renewal built on project-based learning and
experiential learning principles.
The Red House at Georgetown, which serves as an innovation engine, has incubated several projects,
which you can learn more about at their website redhouse.georgetown.edu
While we are situated to initiate innovation with support from university leadership, we also recognize the need for collective sensemaking. We operate in partnership with Georgetown faculty, staff, and students around PBL and experiential learning in order to imagine more possibilities for embedding PBL at all points of the curriculum experience. In the past year, the Red House hosted the (Re)humanizing the University: Future of Experiential Learning Conversation Series as a way to focus on PBL as a paradigmatic opportunity for our university, not just effective pedagogy. With more than 150 faculty, staff, and students participants, the series answered a timely call to understand PBL as a holistic, emergent, and relational response to the complexities of our time, from the changing nature of the workplace, the disruptive integration of AI, the deepening of polarization, and the challenges to the cost benefit of higher education. These convenings strengthened our connections among partner units, disciplinary departments, and students while solidifying Georgetown’s project-based and experiential learning vocabulary around transformation.
Through design sprints and conversations around key questions, we learned where PBL occurs, what it looks like for multiple practitioners, and what capacities we think are essential for students. From these lists of capacities, we asked participants which capacities we thought we did well as an institution, meaning which capacities were consistently fostered across all four years. The capacities most participants mentioned were: community-building, relationships, communication and expression, and reflection. When we asked participants which capacities we could design more of into our degrees, the most common responses were: navigating uncertainty, experimentation, discernment, humility and creativity. These are crucial, integral traits that we know PBL fosters.
Additionally, with all the content generated from these conversations, we drafted a set of emerging principles we hope will guide the development of a PBL and challenge-based lab ecosystem for the next five years. This initial set of principles includes building student agency and identity, fostering community in and outside of Georgetown, seeking relevance, reflecting critically and imaginatively, and integrating perspectives.
Centering human experience at the heart of our structures is one way to demonstrate the value of higher education. We are committed to the belief that higher education provides access, affordability, innovation, and value. In this moment, the human, relational dimensions of learning are central while we navigate the changes that generative AI is imposing on how we learn, how we work, and how we interact with each other. We see PBL as an essential, next generation pedagogy; at the Red House, we are working to embed systems and structures that create a hospitable, receptive environment for widespread adoption of PBL.
Enabling Structural PBL
Forming environments and structures that are grounded in PBL starts at the course level as a powerful idea incubator for the design of a new project-based degree to new work-integrated learning contexts leading to the development of a new ecosystem for supporting PBL at scale. This is what we see as one story of our PBL throughline, demonstrating multiple contexts for relevant, meaningful education centered on the human experience.
University as a Design Problem
Starting in 2013, the University as a Design Problem studio-based seminar centered on imagining and designing new models for a Georgetown education. The primary purpose of the course is to create a community of practice among undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and academic staff around a shared project that addresses a current problem at the university. We work with campus partners to determine the focus for each semester, which have included projects based around reimagining undergraduate core curricula in the College of Arts and Sciences, the School of Foreign Service, the McDonough School of Business.
The seminar portion of the course grounds students in theories and current discourse surrounding higher education, with particular emphasis on understanding the new dynamics of how learning, education and “school” all fit together in a globalized, connected, and volatile world. The studio portion focuses on using PBL and design methodologies to develop and mount preliminary concept designs around the issues at the center of the course. In the last five years, specific design ideas emerged from the University as a Design Problem seminars that formed an innovative, work-integrated learning context at Georgetown’s new Capitol Campus, located on Capitol Hill, and the development of a new undergraduate degree launched in 2024.
New Degree: Bachelor’s in Science in Environment and Sustainability
The Red House, in partnership with the Earth Commons Institute and the College of Arts & Sciences, established a participatory design process to develop a new degree on the environment and sustainability with the goal of “creating a complete liberal arts degree in environment and sustainability that was innovative and forward-facing, as well as rooted in Ignatian principles of education and environmental consciousness.” We started this project with the sole question, “What does it look like to design an entire degree that is project- and challenge-based from the first year immersion projects in the DC area (e.g., river water testing) to final year capstone projects (e.g., scaling partnerships in the environment sector)?”
The curriculum is based on the current challenges facing climate, the environment, and sustainability practices. While grounded in biology and environmental studies, students engage in local and global experiences to examine the environment and impact through interdisciplinary lenses and multiple perspectives. A peer mentorship structure also supports the degree where seniors mentor students in the early one-credit immersion courses.
The first students graduated through this degree in Spring 2026. While it is too early to determine the impact of this degree on the public good, the university’s investment in the Earth Commons Institute and this signature degree point to PBL as a necessary approach to address challenges creatively and systematically. As in any incipient initiative, the issue at hand remains in sustaining the growing infrastructure needed for this program amidst current university structural and financial constraints.
Georgetown’s Capitol Campus and the Applied Learning Lab
Going from degrees to structural contexts to support PBL, Georgetown established a new campus in the downtown Washington, DC, area in 2019. The vision for this new campus is one of transformation, integration, and an interdisciplinary space. This is a space not only where students will integrate their academic learning with professional learning, it is also meant to meet a civic mission to solidify and support the relationship between Georgetown and the city.
One of the earliest programs established at this new campus was its first undergraduate program, the Capitol Applied Learning Labs. The Capitol Applied Learning Labs is Georgetown’s signature immersive lab where students spend a semester learning, living, and working in D.C. In Fall 2019, we had six students enrolled prior to the pandemic; we now have more than 80 per year and growing. The Capitol Applied Learning Labs invites students to pursue their professional goals through challenge-based contexts, to deepen their sense of place in DC, to expand their skills and networks. Every student’s Capitol Applied Learning Labs semester centers on a four-credit professional internship seminar plus customizable major, core, and elective course options connected from there.
The Capitol Applied Learning Labs provided a model for undergraduate engagement within the new campus. Since it started, both the School of Public Policy along with the Earth Commons Institute’s degree described above have added new undergraduate degrees, respectively. Both the Capitol Applied Learning Labs and the BS in Environment and Sustainability project-based degree signal Georgetown’s intentional efforts to foster ethical and reciprocal relationships within the city through PBL programs.
Building a Challenge-based Learning Lab Ecosystem
Given the success of the Capitol Applied Learning Labs as a physical demonstration of experiential education, we aim to support the university in making the Capitol Campus a challenge-based hub of opportunities incorporating efforts from almost all of the schools within Georgetown. In order to cultivate, we imagine the need for an ecosystem across campuses that supports PBL and challenge-based learning. Building off of the examples of a few pioneering models of challenge-based labs, we imagine students working directly with external practitioners--including community organizations, government agencies, NGOs, and corporations--who provide authentic challenges rooted in real organizational needs and societal problems. This idea of “intergenerational teaming,” or course experiences built around continuous engagement with external partners, practitioners, and students, is an area we are focusing on in the next three to five years. This is a moment for students to engage in immersive settings designed to hone their ethical decision-making and discernment skills.
There are five current examples of “challenge labs” at Georgetown; multi-credit, immersive, mentor-based opportunities for students to work on an interdisciplinary project with an emphasis on their intellectual and personal formation. Current examples of labs include a tech and society interdisciplinary lab based within the Law School where graduate students work with policy data from Colorado--an environmental impact lab within our new environment and sustainability degree applying GIS analysis to local environmental issues--and an applied “wicked problems” lab aimed to connect humanities majors with alumni and/or external partners who will bring specific challenges to work on with students in an AI-immersive setting.
While these current instances of challenge labs provoke imaginative forms of learning and teaching, they are disconnected and unstandardized experiences at the moment. Our vision is to create a challenge lab ecosystem where resources could be shared across the labs. In addition to funding and the structures necessary to design and develop immersive, interdisciplinary spaces, we see the expertise developed in one challenge lab as a resource in and of itself that can travel across labs. For example, the current challenge lab professors are expert practitioners in design thinking, data visualization, AI integration, entrepreneurial thinking, and conflict resolution. We imagine these practitioners working within each others’ labs to expose students to a set of skills needed to address the challenges being studied.
We envision three tiers of engagement within the ecosystem: 1) course infusion modules; 2) year-long courses centered on investigating and acting on a complex problem over an academic term or full year; and 3) sustained, multiyear challenge experiences built into degrees to allow increasing levels of complexity, culminating in senior capstone work that builds on earlier challenge foundations or mentoring other students.
We are also building this ecosystem in a time where new presidential and provost leadership will occur over the next two years. The current interim president and provost support these efforts as vital to sustain momentum towards transformation while consolidating the resources required to do so. They see the expansion of project-based learning and its focus on building confident, effective citizens as essential to the survival of the institution. This narrative supersedes an emphasis on employment outcomes: Georgetown graduates need to enter post-college life equipped to handle uncertainty, navigate ambiguity, and approach decision-making through nuanced discernment.
Beyond employment outcomes, we see each initiative as speaking to the emerging experiential learning principles identified above: agency, reflection, community, and perspective-taking taken together to cultivate students with the necessary tools to engage with their world in imaginative and community-oriented ways. The Capitol Campus location represents a physical location to bring project-based learning into authentic contexts that speak to the skills, knowledge, and most importantly the participatory, imaginative mindsets we wish to foster in student learning.
Driving Educational Commitment through Trust
Given The Red House’s roots in scholarship of teaching and learning, pedagogical innovation, and faculty development, we would not have gotten very far in our story without situating our efforts in evidence-informed research, collaborative needs assessments, and faculty and staff conversations. At each stage of our processes, we affirm that our work aligns with university priorities.
We are also in a unique position to share our work frequently with university board members and alumni stakeholders who provide receptive, relevant sounding boards for our efforts. Our relationship with the university advancement office is a reciprocal partnership to ensure any philanthropic narrative is grounded in relevant language and a cohesive framework. In turn, we have opportunities to determine where best to focus our efforts based on feedback and current concerns of stakeholders.
For example, two years ago, alumni were asking us what we (as an institution) were doing about generative AI. At that time, we partnered with our center for teaching and learning to launch an initiative on the pedagogical uses of AI. Anchoring any technological moment within understanding how it serves teaching and learning helps our institution not just understand the machinations of the technology but how people are interacting and using these tools. This year, alumni were asking us how we were building programs to strengthen students’ engagement in dialogue through attention, focus, and listening. In other words, we are currently receiving questions about how we are centering the human experience in a Georgetown education.
Through the Future of Experiential Learning Conversation series, we are in a position to communicate our values through the words generated by our colleagues as to what is important to embed in our structures: student agency, critical reflection, relevance, multiple perspectives, and dialogue. Valuing these elements of what is crucial for student learning warrants more PBL structures within our institutions. This is not only genuine; it is meeting the moment of rapid change within higher education. This consistent narrative allows us to maintain focus while proposing new structures to meet the next 10 years of graduates entering a volatile, uncertain world.