Engaged Learning in the Academy: Challenges and Possibilities(Community Engagement in Higher Education)

Advocates of engaged learning in higher education through programs such as internships, cooperative education, and service-learning make strong claims for its value to students, colleges, and communities. But many mainstream academics either ignore or reject those claims, favoring more conventional forms of curriculum and teaching. Drawing on ethnographies of scores of student-interns and many years of professional practice, Moore tackles the controversy over whether first-hand experience is a legitimate and effective source of learning. He identifies both the pitfalls and the possibilities in engaged pedagogies and suggests conditions under which they might work best.

Table of Contents:
1. The Paradox of Experiential Learning in Higher Education 2. A Theoretical Framework 3. Analyzing the Curriculum of Experience 4. Comparing Curricula - Academic and Experiential 5. Discovering the Pedagogy of Experience 6. Pedagogy in School and Field 7. Experiential Pedagogies in School 8. Institutional Mission(s) and Engaged Learning

About the Author :
David Thornton Moore has been on the faculty of the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University, USA, since 1982. A Harvard-trained educational anthropologist, he has conducted ethnographic studies of student-interns at more than seventy sites. His work has been published in journals such as the Harvard Educational Review and the Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning; he has had chapters in numerous books about experiential learning; and he is a coauthor of Working Knowledge: Work-based Learning and Education Reform (2004).

Review :
"David Moore's book is precisely what experiential educators have been needing and waiting for. Long a leader, researcher and practitioner of engaged learning, Moore walks his own talk. This book is a veritable seminar that supports and challenges experiential educators to become reflective practitioners who are engaged in transformative learning, both professionally and personally." - Garry Hesser, Sabo Professor of Citizenship and Learning at Augsburg College and former President of the National Society for Experiential Education "Using his three decades of scholarship on experiential learning and his encyclopedic knowledge of practices and programs, Moore tackles the contested terrain of whether and how experiential education fits in the academy. This book is a must-read for skeptics and advocates of the pedagogy of experience as they both will be challenged by Moore's relentless pursuit of a resolution to the paradox of experiential education in contemporary higher education." - Dwight E. Giles Jr., Professor, Higher Education Administration, University of Massachusetts, Boston, USA