Higher Education and Democracy: Essays on Service-Learning and Civic Engagement

by John Saltmarsh (Editor), Edward Zlotkowski (Editor)

Overview

Higher Education and Democracy is a collection of essays written over the last ten years on how civic engagement in higher education works to achieve what authors John Saltmarsh and Edward Zlotkowsi consider to be the academic and civic purposes of higher education. These include creating new modes of teaching and learning, fostering participation in American democracy, the development and respect for community and civic institutions, and encouraging the constant renewal all of these dimensions of American life.

Organized chronologically, the twenty-two essays in this volume provide "signposts" along the road in the journey of fulfilling the civic purposes of higher education. For the authors, service-learning is positioned as centrally important to the primary academic systems and structures of higher education, departments, disciplines, curriculum, and programs that are central to the faculty domain. Progressing from the general and the contextual to specific practices embodied in ever larger academic units, the authors conclude with observations on the future of the civic engagement movement.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781439900390
Publisher:	Temple University Press
Publication date:	01/28/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	404
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Dr. John Saltmarsh is the Director of the New England Resource Center for Higher Education (NERCHE) at the University of Massachusetts, Boston as well as a faculty member in the Higher Education Administration Doctoral Program in the Department of Leadership in Education in the Graduate College of Education.

Edward Zlotkowski is a Professor of English at Bentley College. He writes and speaks extensively on a wide range of service-learning and civic engagement-related topics, and served as general editor of the American Association for Higher Education's 21-volume series on service-learning in the academic disciplines.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Putting into Practice the Civic Purposes of Higher Education, John Saltmarsh and Edward Zlotkowski

SECTION I: General Need
SECTION II: Antecedents
SECTION III: Service-Learning Pedagogy
SECTION IV: Service-Learning in the Curriculum: The First Year
SECTION V: Service-Learning in the Curriculum: The Disciplines
SECTION VI: Engaged Departments
SECTION VII: The Engaged Campus
SECTION VIII: Over a Decade Later

Conclusion: Looking Back, Looking Ahead: A Dialogue, John Saltmarsh and Edward Zlotkowski
References
Contributors
Index

Editorial Reviews

"[This] book is a significant addition to the field of service-learning and civic engagement in higher education and should become a standard resource. The authors are arguably the two most significant thought leaders in service-learning and civic engagement today, and the breadth and depth of their assembled essays—on issues of definition and rationale, models, on-the-ground implementation, institutional change, future directions—are remarkable. Higher Education and Democracy does an admirable job of illustrating the evolution and complexity of the authors' thinking regarding the most significant issues facing the field."
—Patti H. Clayton, Consultant (PHC Ventures) and Senior Scholar with the Center for Service and Learning at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis

From the Publisher

Saltmarsh (director, New England Resource Ctr. for Higher Education, Univ. of Massachusetts, Boston) and Zlotkowski (English, Bentley Coll.) have assembled a collection of essays written over the past ten years about service learning and civic engagement in higher education. Service learning, or putting what one is learning in the classroom to work helping others, is an increasingly popular way for universities and colleges to give students a truly valuable opportunity. The book is divided into general sections that progress logically for implementing service learning: general need, antecedents, pedagogy, service learning in the first-year curriculum, considering disciplines, and engaged departments and campus. Concluding essays examine the development of service learning over the last ten years. Saltmarsh and Zlotkowski's concept is similar to that of William Ayers and others in Teaching Toward Democracy but more in-depth, philosophical, and theoretical. Also, Ayers focuses on a variety of teaching techniques in K-12 contexts, while Saltmarsh and Zlotkowski treat higher education. VERDICT With an extremely academic tone, this is a valuable resource for professors and administrators in higher education using or supporting service learning.—Mark Bay, Univ. of the Cumberlands Lib., Williamsburg, KY

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