I agree with you that project based course is better that banking model. But my concern is in project base course, you learned a lot about the concepts you applied in your project and part of the course would not be taken seriously by students. I think critical pedagogy alone may be not solve all the problem.

let me disagree with you about your point about top universities. I was at Harvard for a year and I had a chance to audit classes both in MIT and Harvard. Prominent economists both at Harvard and MIT are awesome teachers at the same time too. Yes there are good researchers who are not good in teaching as well as their research and vice versa, but it is not true that in universities with high emphasis on research, students will deprive from having good teachers as well. At least my experience is contradict with that.

So whenever there is poverty in a society and removing poverty make some negative externality in the form of environmental pollution, then what should we do? should we think about environment or social justice?