The goal of this article is to assess the national and transnational forms of the spread and reception of pedagogical ideas through a very concrete example, namely, the study of the project method. There are several good reasons for choosing this subject. In the first place, it was quite important that the theoretical construct of the New Education chosen for study should exhibit a genealogy that could be traced and documented; second, it had to be well defined a priori; third, it had to be universally known, it should have circulated visibly on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, and fourth, it should have exerted a clear influence on schoolroom practices during the twentieth century. The ultimate aim of this article is to demonstrate the precarious balance between the national and the global tendencies by means of an analysis of some of the different pedagogical scenarios in which the project method was built and propagated. The first part of the article analyses the origin of the concept in one national community, the United States, and the different interpretations given to it by its initial promoters before its final formulation by pedagogues of the University of Columbia, who in a way "appropriated" for themselves the definitive version of the method. The second part of the article takes a look at the transnational nature of the method and of its presence and its propagation throughout the global pedagogical movement of the New Education Fellowship. This is achieved through the study of the network's more emblematic publications and international conferences, which serve to illustrate the contradictory interpretations that the project method received. All of these interpretations are best comprehended within the framework of the debate between the paidocentric and the socialising schools of thought that so many sectors of the movement engaged in during the 1920s and 1930s. The third part of the article provides an in-depth analysis of a specific national scenario, that of Spain, where the project method gained considerable popularity in the 1930s for reasons that were political and ideological as much as they were pedagogical. The interpretation and realisation of the method in this case owed much to the original North American conception, while the subsequent Columbian contributions were for the most part ignored. (Contains 105 footnotes.)