Fieldwork in Academia and higher education implies observing how the context is influenced by powerful paradigms. Currently, the dominant paradigm seems to be related to the academic learning context and to be linked to a process of change directed by the learning outcome paradigm. This paper focuses on the shift in pedagogical paradigms in higher education between the Danish Project Pedagogical paradigm (DPP) from the 1970’es and the Learning Paradigm in the 2000’es. The paper aims to map the academic educational context and reconstruct the platform as background for ethnographic analysis of the paradigm shift and its consequences. Hereby, the paper contributes to reflections on research methodology and strategies for paradigm analysis.

To stay focused on the shifting dominant paradigm, the paper is divided in two parts based on comprehensive fieldwork referring to the decades 1980s-1990s and 2000s-2010s and to the authors’ main studies at the Danish reform universities in Aalborg, AUC (Borgnakke 1996) in Roskilde, RUC and in Copenhagen Business School, CBS (Christensen 2013) .
The first part is inspired by Thomas Kuhn’s concepts sketching the elements in the Project Pedagogical paradigm related to the main issues concerning: The teacher as supervisor; the independent project work; the student’s learning strategies. Thomas Kuhn's concepts enable the overall description of the paradigm and the paradigm-typical features and issues linked to the levels of project organization, teaching- and learning processes. Against this background, the second part, inspired by Michel Foucault's concepts, will focus on the students’ subjectification through being participants in small group learning activities as part of their project studies. Both parts will be exemplified by empirical findings. Finally, the paper summarizes potentials and pitfalls of the Project Pedagogical-paradigm anno 2022 confronted with the learning outcome paradigm and the consequences of decades ruled by OECD policy and the Bologna process deposits.