Capstones are prominent bricks laid on top of built structures or the outside walls of buildings for everyone to see. They are manifestations of completed work that showcase to the world the culmination of a project. Over the last decade, the term has been adopted for educational use; capstone projects are final projects undertaken by more and more university students in their last year of study. Drawing together many different elements of learning, they are the crowning accomplishments of students’ learning journeys. They are also catalysts that launch students into their lives after university and therefore often linked to the employability agenda I critiqued in the previous chapter. However, from a generative theory perspective, capstones can open up spaces for students to imagine and work towards radical alternatives to current challenges.

I therefore see capstones as a fitting end to my book on critical-creative pedagogy, especially as their spelling encapsulates the main elements of this pedagogy – creative, analytical, practical – CAPstones. By presenting the conclusion to Creative Universities as a series of experimental capstone projects, as prototypes of potential future uses of critical-creative pedagogy, I also shift from imagining in steps to dreaming in leaps. I move from the small-scale, careful, classroom-focused approach of the preceding chapters to imagining larger utopian initiatives that bring together students from different disciplines, schools or faculties across universities to work on ambitious capstone projects. In formulating these projects, I draw on arguments and activities from previous chapters as well as the literature cited throughout the book and articulate these insights into thought-experiments that enact generative theorizing of new possibilities within expansive and participatory universities. I do so in a critically-hopeful way, inspired by Freire's observation that ‘my hope is necessary but it is not enough. Alone, it does not win. But without it, my struggle will be weak and wobbly. We need critical hope the way a fish needs unpolluted water’ (1994, p 2).

After a brief introduction, I present several examples of possible projects and initial ideas for how they could be undertaken. My hope is that readers will follow my final imaginative leap and consider possible capstone projects at their own institutions. The projects are conceived as open-ended action research, carried out within universities that become experimental spaces supported by adequate resources.