Description:
"Higher Education and Democracy"ais 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.
Review Quotes:
"[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